ATTITUDES
Initial thoughts

Attitudes and expression of identity
– Identity function
– Utilitarian function

Interdiscplinary analysis
– Behaviorism
– Other fields
Classic debate: attitude neutrality (?)
Neutrality vs. Ambivalence vs. “No information”
– Measurement?
 Societal value
 Possible?

Why Neutrality is Difficult

#1 Automaticity of attitudes
#2: mere exposure effect
 Zajonc
(1968)
– The “Turkish word” study
 e.g., saricik, kadirga, ikitaf
 0, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 25 exposures
 pronounce aloud each time
 Guess good vs. bad meaning
Moreland and Zajonc (1973)

Subliminal presentation (4 ms)
Test phase:
–“old” vs. and “new” symbols
–Recognition task: chance level
–Liking: old symbols preferred
Additional information about mere exposure effect

The effects of repeated exposure depend on initial
appraisal of the stimulus
Initially liked, or neutral: increased liking, but:
Initially disliked: increased disliking
Classic Problems in Attitude
Measurement
Response alternatives not
appropriate
2. Acquiescence (yea-saying) biases
3. Framing
1.
Examples
Abortion
Pro-life
vs. pro-choice; “fetus” vs. “unborn child”, etc…
Cloning
“What
is your attitude toward research on animal
cloning?”
“If
research on animal cloning could be used to
advance our ability to prevent cancer, would you be in
favor of such research?”
4. Social desirability effects (Goffman,
1959).
Social
desirability
“true”
attitude
Fundamental problem: “how much” of response is due to one
factor or other.
“Classic” (older) approaches
Vary context in which responses are made
 The “Bogus Pipeline” (Jones & Sigall,
1971)

– Participants “practice” on machine, to convince that can
detect truth from lying
– Then asked to express honest attitudes toward mix of
new attitudes, some mundane, some socially sensitive
Older approaches, continued

Disguise/mask what’s being asked
– “Symbolic” attitudes
Underlying attitude A1
(socially unacceptable )
Overtly
expressed
attitude A2
examples of “symbolic” attitudes (Kinder,
1986)

“____ students receive too much financial assistance from the
university” (Boneicki, 1998)

“Discrimination against Blacks is a thing of the past” (McConahay,
1986)

“Downtown St. Louis has too much crime”
Potential advantages vs. disadvantages?
Tradeoff: efforts to disguise question threaten
construct validity
Newer approach: Implicit Attitudes

Attitude object (prime)  target
– Presentation of prime assumed to facilitate or inhibit
response to the target
– Semantic priming

“chocolate” “food” (semantic priming)
– Evaluative priming




“chocolate”  “good” (direct)
“chocolate”  “flower” (indirect)
“chocolate”  “disgusting”
Types of implicit priming tasks
Lexical decision tasks: decide whether
target is a word or not
prime
chocolate
xxxxxxxx
target
“good”
“good”
decision
response
“Word
or nonword?”
RT
measured
response
Lexical decision tasks, continued
 Construct facilitation indices
– RT (xxxxx  good) – RT (chocolate good)
– (500 milliseconds) - (200 milliseconds) = 300 ms
– 300 ms represents implicit attitude index
Evaluative decision tasks
 Very
similar to lexical decision, but
judgmental decision different
prime
target
chocolate
desirable
xxxxxx
desirable
decision
response
response
Is it a
good or
a bad
word?
some brief demonstrations
Summary
If “A” and “B” are associated in memory,
then presenting A should make B more
accessible
 Consequences of accessibility: faster to
decide if B is

– a word (lexical decision)
– positive or negative (evaluative decision)
Why implicit attitudes potentially
interesting
Potential dissociation
 Conscious vs. unconscious
 Implicit attitudes less “contaminated” by
self-presentational bias (?)
 Implicit attitudes “purer” measures of true
attitudes (???)

Strong argument:
separate systems view
Automatic
(unconscious)
system
Controlled
(conscious)
system
Implicit
tasks
Explicit
tasks
The critics speak
“just another attitude measure”
 predictive validity?

– see Lambert, Payne, Shaffer, & Ramsey (2005)

assumptions may be incorrect
– strong correlations sometimes found
– controllability of reactions to implicit tasks?

“No such thing as a process-pure measure”
– Larry Jacoby
– No task 100% automatic
– No task 100% controlled
More realistic view?
Automatic
system
Implicit
tasks
Controlled
system
Explicit
tasks
Subliminal Advertising?
Historical Background

The James Vicary incident (late 1950s)
– Popcorn sales increase by 50%, he says.

Media reaction:



Minds have been “broken and entered” (The New
Yorker, 9/21/57)
“The most alarming and outrageous discovery” since
the invention of the machine gun (The Nation,
10/5/57)
FCC bans subliminal advertising
People’s current views toward
subliminal vs. “regular” advertising:
 Subliminal
ads feared more, believed to be
more effective (Wilson et al. 1998)
 Subliminal self-help tapes
– $50 million as of 1990
Evidence?
Vicary’s claims: fabricated!
 No evidence that subliminal advertising
works in real-life contexts
 Note: Regular advertising EXTREMELY
powerful, but people believe that they are
immune to it (Wilson & Brekke, 1994)

Subliminal influence
in laboratory settings—
growing evidence
So why no evidence (yet) that
subliminal advertising works
outside of the laboratory?
 “Noisy” contexts?



Temporal distance?
Fixed attitudes hard to change?
Maybe does exist, just harder to measure
Could subliminal priming be used
to enhance self-esteem?



“I like myself, but I don’t know why: Enhancing implicit self esteem by
subliminal evaluative conditioning” (Dijksterhuis, 2004)
Modified lexical decision task
The word “I” presented for 17 milliseconds, followed by…
– 50% trials: positive adjectives (e.g. Warm, sweet, nice, sincere, honest,
beautiful, cheerful, smart, strong, wise, healthy, funny, nice)
– 50% trials: non words


Control participants: positive adjectives replaced with neutral words
(e.g. table)
Results show enhanced self-esteem, immunity to failure feedback
– Replicates across six experiments