Attitudes: foundations and debates

George Gaskell

Flagship Series

Department of Social Psychology

Attitudes are alive and well

• The importance of data on attitudes and opinions in many disciplines and in social research can hardly be denied.

• The political opinion poll is the “ideal type”. Expressed preferences as a proxy for choices and action

• Hence the reliance on attitude measurement in many domains – social and political research, marketing, organisational research, communications etc.

• I’m currently involved in the design, analysis and reporting of surveys on the ‘Life Sciences’ and ‘Food risks’ in which the data collection amounts to €1.6m

• Yet in social psychology there is a continuing debate about the status of the concept.

Some of the heated debates in social psychology

• Social representations cf Moscovici and Duveen and Jovchelovitch.

• Attitudes as epi-phenomena: the discourse tradition ( Potter and Billig).

• Neuro-cognitive psychological approaches – brain mechanisms and MRI scans.

• ‘Fundamental’ research to establish reliable and valid techniques for measurement, (Krosnick).

• Concerns about response variability due to context effects and question wording, (Gaskell) and attitudes as on-line constructions (Zaller)

• A return to affect (Schwarz)

Early theories

• Thomas and Znaniecki: attitudes as the individual counterpart to social values

• This Durkheimian tradition was reinterpreted by Asch who saw attitudes as social sentiments – deep seated and an essential part of the fabric of a group.

Allport and the individualisation of the social

• Allport, G. (1954) the attitude: ‘a mental or neural state of readiness, organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence on the individuals responses to all objects and situations with which it is related’

• This definition represents the hard core assumption : attitudes are the mental triggers of action. A uni-directional causal path from attitudes to behaviours: the ‘projectile model’.

Competing philosophical positions

• Historically most researchers treat the attitude as a hypothetical construct

• But different conceptions as to the nature of the construct.

• An implicit response to a given object – an evaluation of some aspect of an unproblematic reality that is out there – the Cartesian position.

• Attitudes are part of the construction of reality, a template through which reality is created – the Gestalt/constructivist approach

3 component model of attitudesRosenberg – Yale School

Stimulus Attitude

Cognitive: what you know

Evaluative: what you feel

Behavioural: what you do

Observable antecedents

Hypothetical variable

Observableresponses

Attitudes can be measured• Take 50 or so statements about a social object• Thurstone’s technique: judges allocate the statements on an

interval scale from positive to negative• Item analysis leads to selection of circa 12 items that amount

to a ruler to determine where a person is located on the attitudinal dimension

• Likert’s technique: judges rate statements on scale - strongly agree (+2) thru neither agree nor disagree (0) to strongly disagree (-2). Can be from 5 to 11 scale points

• Item analysis leads to selection of questions which individually correlate with the total of all items

• Leading to a cumulative scale – respondents indicate level of agreement/disagreement to all items.

• Helped along by developments in statistical sampling theory

Theory and measurement drive programmes of research

• Quantitative index of the affective component• Measurement equals ‘science’• Parallel developments of the cognitive

component not pursued• Justification from consistency theory – the three

components in a dynamic equilibrium cf Festinger’s cognitive dissonance – if behaviour is at variance with cognition and affect then rationalisation.

A troubling anomaly: ‘what we say and what we do’

• Concerns about the unquestioned link between attitudes and behaviour. - La Pierre.

• Wicker (1969) “taken as a whole (a meta-analysis), these studies show that attitudes are more likely to be only slightly or unrelated to behaviour”.

• Essentially, the projectile model abandoned (or should have been) as the projectile’s progress is affected by laws, norms and social pressures – the social context

• This should have been obvious from research into group processes cf Kurt Lewin in the 1950s

Fishbein – the basis of modern theorising on the attitude

• A 2 component model• Attitude becomes the affect (+ve or –ve)

attached to an object.• Cognition is beliefs about the object• And behavioural intention (note not behaviour,

since the road to hell is paved with good intentions) is a function of the attitude and social normative beliefs.

• Extended into a model of planned behaviour and the basis for health beliefs model

Problems with the attitude construct• One from of representing the world – a ranking in terms

of preference; but there are other ways of representing the world that are of interest.

• On important matters ‘few think alone’; where is the social in the social psych of the attitude? Fishbein’s social normative beliefs contrasts the sovereign individual and the social world

• What about widespread beliefs – how do we account for these?

• What are the origins of attitudes? Possibly values – taking us back to the early days of social psychology. This is my current preoccupation, but that is another lecture.