What are Attitudes and how do psychologists measure them

Introduction

Attitudes have continued to be a core concept in social psychology and as a result invigorated studies on attitudes, attitudes and behaviour formation, and the link between the structure of attitude and the process of attitude change among others. The concept of attitudes has also sparked applied research with such researchers trying to understand the effect of attitude in real life issues for example personnel psychology and consumer psychology. The aim of this paper is to explain the conceptualization of attitudes drawing from different theories of attitudes. In addition, the paper seeks to explore the different ways that psychologists use to measure attitudes and how effective the methods are at measuring attitudes.

The concept of attitude

Researchers differently define attitude but these definitions show some significant characteristics of attitude. According to Cushman and McPhee (2013), an attitude refers to an evaluation of an object of thought. Attitude objects in this case is anything an individual holds in mind be it another person, an idea, a group, or any other thing. On the other hand, Kroesen et al. (2017) define an attitude as a person’s disposition to react to a person, behaviour, event, institution, or an object with a certain measure of favourableness or unfavourableness. From the same perspective, Jain (2014) defines attitude as the predisposition of a person to evaluate an object or symbol or any other aspect of his/her world in a favourable manner. Still, Vogel and Wanke (2016) define attitude as the degree of positive or negative affect that a person associates with a psychological object. Finally, Maio et al. (2018) refer to attitude as an enduring system of positive or negative evaluations, pro and con tendencies, and emotional feelings associated with a social object.

Although formal definitions of attitude vary as seen above, social psychology theorists agree there are unique characteristics identifiable in any formal definition of attitude. First, attitude is evaluative in nature. From the positive-negative and pro-con dimension, different scaling techniques have been developed to evaluate attitude, which expounds its evaluative nature (Albarracin and Shavitt 2018). Second, attitude is known to be a hypothetical construct. Bodenhausen and Gawronski (2013) posit that attitude is cannot be directly observed thus has to be inferred from measurable reactions to the social object. The reactions in this case must reflect how favourably or unfavourably a person evaluates the social object. Through evaluations, both verbal and non-verbal responses can be categorized into attitude-relevant responses. Third, attitude is seen as a latent variable from the structural modelling perspective. On the other hand, affective, cognitive, and conative reactions whether verbal or non-verbal are seen to be manifest indicators of attitude (Pratkanis et al. 2014). It is the interaction between these active variables that trigger specific response to an object, which is often termed as attitude towards the object. Despite the agreement in the characteristics of attitude, psychologists are yet to agree whether attitudes are stable entities stored in memory or whether attitudes are temporary judgments constructed instantly based on the information at hand (Hohman 2014).

Theories of attitudes

Researchers have developed different theories to explain the concepts of attitude and attitude formation. Broadly, social psychologists view attitudes from the stable-entity view or the constructionist view. MODE (motivation and opportunity as determinants) and the meta-cognitive models are the most popular from the stable-entity view. The two models hold that attitudes are long-term memory structures. The MODE model represents an objects based on its global representation (Burns and Conchie 2015). This implies that once an individual encounters the object, the mind associates the object with its global evaluation. For example, Arabs and Muslim others are globally evaluated as terrorists; therefore, an individual is likely to associate a person wearing hijab with a terrorist. The meta-cognitive model on the other hand draws similar structural assumptions but considers the possibility that an object is linked to more than one summary evaluation with varying associative strength (Petty and Briñol 2015). For example; although Islam is globally associated with terrorism, some communities particularly Arabs and Muslims associate Islam with peace thus will not have the same reaction as the person associating Islam with terrorism.

From the constructionist perspective, attitudes are seen as evaluative judgments constructed in the situation based on the currently accessible information as opposed to an enduring personal disposition (Cooley et al. 2015). It is worth noting that some of the information used in the construction process includes stored evaluations but the accessible information is accorded special theoretical status. This implies that upon an encounter, a person will use the accessible information to inform reactions as compared to what was previously known. For example, after the 9/11 attack, Americans perception of Muslims as terrorists was heightened which resulted to Islamophobia. However, the association of Muslims with terrorism has faded over time and Americans as somewhat accommodative to the Muslims as compared to immediately after 9/11 attack.

The associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model also asserts that attitudes are constructed in the situation. The model depicts that the association to be activated in response to a specific object depends on the pre-existing structure of association in memory as well as the overall set on input stimuli (Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2014). Nonetheless, an encounter with an object cannot activate every mental association related to that object thus only the most relevant object-related association available in the memory will be activated. Thus, the model emphasizes that the response given to a particular object depends on the overall configuration of input stimuli. For example, encountering a black person in a jazz bar may activate a musical stereotypical attribute while encountering the same person in a dark alley would activate a criminal stereotypical attribute. Therefore, the context in which an object is encountered considerably affections the kind of association a person makes.

Context sensitivity versus stability of attitudes

Plethora of literature seeks to establish whether attitudes are sensitive to the situation or are stable through different contexts. Although there is vast evidence that attitudes are context sensitive, there is also evidence that many attitudes remain stable even in the face of changing situations (Bar-Anan and Nosek 2014). The context-sensitivity notion supports the constructionist view while the cross-situational stability supports the belief that attitudes are stored in the long-term memory readily accessible when needed. Studies in support of the stability of attitudes agree that a person is likely to make similar judgments if the same response has been activated severally in similar situations and with the same results (Vogel and Wanke 2016). This means that the inputs could be situational but the overall result remains the same, which then produces stability over time. For example, if a person fears a spider, he/she will avoid spiders and they are likely to scream when they unexpectedly see one. The pattern is likely to be repeated and becomes stable over time such that the first attitude at the sight of a spider is screaming.

Attitude strength significantly affects attitude stability. Petty and Krosnick (2014) define attitude strength as the degree of impact and durability in an attitude. Strong attitudes (those manifesting in higher quantities of durability and impact) are more stable over time and across situations thus will be consistently recalled from the memory. On the contrary, weak attitudes are less stable, less accessible, and therefore more likely to be influenced by changes in the context. For example, someone who just developed fear for spiders in less likely to scream upon encountering a spider in an exam room as compared to another individual who had feared spiders since childhood.

Attitude stability is also challenged by the number of summary evaluations in the memory each with its characteristics that influence its activation (Saris and Sniderman 2018). For example, a person who has heavily smoked in the past may strongly associate the act of smoking with positive evaluation. However, upon therapy completion, the person develops a negative evaluation of smoking which is now tagged as valid. In such a case, the old evaluation of smoking persists in the memory but upon accessing the health information, the old evaluation is tagged as invalid. Therefore, the negative evaluation of smoking is more likely to be activated when the person sees a cigarette in that this association is deemed valid. This implies that attitudes are stable based on how valid their evaluations are.

Measuring attitudes

For a very long time, self-report scales have been used to measure attitudes. In this method of measuring attitudes, a respondent is directly asked to evaluate an attitude object by checking a numeric response on a single or multiple items (Vogel and Wanke 2016). Self-report scales are widely used in measuring attitudes because people are willing and able to accurately report their attitudes. Unfortunately, the results with self-report scales are not always accurate as some people try to hide their attitudes in order to present themselves positively (Pearl and Puhl 2014). In addition, attitudes may not be open to reflective access hampering the results of self-report scales. Upon the discovery of the limitations of the self-report scales, social psychologists have developed different implicit attitude measures in order to overcome motivated response bias as well as investigate the aspects of attitudes that are not open to reflection. Among the modern attitude measurement tools are implicit association test (IAT) and the evaluative priming task.

The IAT measures implicit attitudes by examining the automatic associations between various attitude objects and various evaluative attributes. In the words of Banaji (2013), the IAT measures how closely an attitude object such as a spider or flower is associated with an evaluative attribute in terms of pleasant or unpleasant. The tool assumes that the closer the association, the stronger the implicit attitude is. For example, an IAT experiment measuring attitudes towards insects and flowers will include five stages of activities. First, the respondents will categorize target words relevant to the attitude object (for instance spider and rose) as either insect words or flower words by pressing a key with their left hand for an insect word and right hand for a flower word. Second, the respondents will categorize different sets of words such as happy or rotten as either pleasant or unpleasant by pressing a key using the left hand for unpleasant and right hand for pleasant. The third stage combines the learnt categorizations: press a key with left hand for either insect or unpleasant word and a key with right hand for rose and pleasant word. The response keys are reversed in the fourth stage and the implicit attitude determined in stage five by combining the attitude object categorization with the categorization of evaluative attributes. It has been observed that people are quicker to respond to items paired with positive words in the IAT. Though effective at measuring implicit attitudes, the IAT cannot be used to measure explicit attitudes: IAT and explicit attitude measures are independent constructs (Vogel and Wanke 2016).

In the evaluative priming tasks, respondents press keys to evaluate target stimuli such as adjectives which are preceded by primes representing attitude objects such as images of young versus old persons (Herring et al. 2013). Response times are reduced when evaluations of the prime and the target match and prolonged when prime and target evaluations do not match. The difference between response times in the matching and mismatching trials reveals attitude attributes. For example, a person who quickly responds to trials with old faces and positive adjectives than to trials with young faces and negative adjectives displays an implicit preference for the old faces. Just as the IAT, evaluative priming tasks are not effective in measuring explicit attitudes which calls for more attitude measurement tools (Wentura and Rothermund 2014).

Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to elaborate on the concept of attitudes drawing from different theories as well as analyse different ways of measuring attitudes. The results reveal that different scholars define attitudes differently but there are common characteristics for attitudes including the evaluative nature, a hypothetical construct, and a latent variable. From the constructionist and the APE perspective, attitudes are constructed in the situation while the MODE model purports those attitudes and stored in the memory and retrieved when needed. To a large extent, the paper agrees that attitudes are context sensitive but there is evidence that attitudes are stable across contexts and over durations, traditionally, attitudes are measured on self-report scales but recently the IAT and evaluative priming tasks have been developed to measure implicit attitudes.

References

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