Attitudes and Attitude Change CHAPTER 7 Attitudes and Attitude ...

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Attitudes and Attitude Change
3. People’s attitudes toward greeting cards are clearly affectively based. Your approach should
therefore be to play on these emotions. You would recommend presenting ads that depict joyous
birthdays and weddings, proud moments like graduation, etc. (pp. 179 & 200)
4. According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model, people take the central route to persuasion when
they are both motivated and able to attend to arguments presented. Subsequent attitude change
will persist, be consistent with behaviors, and resist counterpersuasion. If people are either
unmotivated or unable to attend to the arguments, they will attend to cues, which are peripheral to
the message, and take the peripheral route to persuasion. Subsequent attitude change will be
short-lived, be inconsistent with behaviors, and will change again in the face of
counterpersuasion.
(pp. 185-189)
5. Attitude inoculation makes people immune to attempts to change cognitively based attitudes by
initially exposing them to small doses of the arguments against their position. Peer pressure is
likely to play on adolescents’ feelings of autonomy and social rejection. That is, it is directed at
changing affectively, rather than cognitively based attitudes. The attitude inoculation technique
can be modified by exposing adolescents to small doses of peer pressure during role-playing
interventions. (pp. 194-196)
6. Counterattitudinal advocacy can lead to private attitude change when the person does not have
sufficient external justification for their behavior. Cognitive dissonance is the process underlying
this change. (pp. 183-184)
7. Peripheral cues are surface characteristics of the message such as the length of the message, who
delivers the message (e.g. expert, celebrity), or the attractiveness of the communicator. The
central route to persuasion leads to lasting attitude change. (pp. 186 & 189)
8. A moderate level of fear is best. The moderate amount of fear should be combined with a
message that will teach people how to reduce the fear because then the audience will be
motivated to analyze the message carefully and will likely change their attitudes via the central
route. (pp. 190-191)
9. Attitudes predict spontaneous behaviors only when they are highly accessible to people. Attitudes
can predict deliberate behaviors when you know about the person’s intentions. According to the
theory of planned behavior, intention is determined by three things: the person’s attitude toward
the specific behavior, the person’s subjective norms, and the person’s perceived behavioral
control. (pp. 197-199)
10. Many studies of subliminal perception have been conducted and there is no evidence that the
types of subliminal messages encountered in everyday life have any influence on people’s
behavior. There is evidence for subliminal effects in carefully controlled laboratory studies.
However, to get subliminal effects, researchers have to make sure that the illumination of the
room is just right, that people are seated just the right distance from a viewing screen, and that
nothing else is occurring to distract them as the subliminal stimuli are flashed. These messages
might have subtle influences on people’s liking for an ambiguous stimulus, but they cannot
override their wishes and desires.
(pp. 203-204)