Effects of beliefs

Effects of beliefs

It could be argued that persuasive messages such as advertisements often change attitudes by changing people’s beliefs about the object of the message. For example, anti-smoking ads attempt to change people’s beliefs about the consequences of smoking, and those beliefs should in turn influence their attitude towards smoking. Consider a simple experiment in which Canadian participants received a booklet describing a study of a new immigrant group to Canada (Maio, Esses & Bell, 1994). The information in the booklet was manipulated to create positive and/or negative beliefs about the group. For example, some participants read that the immigrants scored above average on desirable personality traits (e.g. hardworking, honest), whereas other participants read that the group members scored below average on these traits. After reading the information, participants rated their attitudes towards the group. Not surprisingly, the results indicated that those who received positive information indicated more favourable attitudes towards the immigrant group than those who received negative information. This simple demonstration is important from a practical perspective, because it demonstrates how even second-hand information about others can have a powerful effect on our attitudes towards them. When prejudice has arisen largely from indirect information, interventions encourage direct, positive interactions to change beliefs and reduce the prejudice. Effects of feelings If you look carefully at advertisements, you will find that many give very little information about the objects they are promoting. For example, an advertisement for a Citroen car showssupermodel Claudia Schiffer smiling and undressing on her way to the car, while upbeat music plays in the background. Rather than focusing on concrete information (e.g. performance, fuel economy), ads like this work by linking the product with positive feelings.

Research supports this technique.

Many studies use a classical conditioning approach (see chapter 4), which exposes participants to the name of an attitude object together with an accompanying positive or negative stimulus (e.g. Cacioppo, Marshall-Goodell, Tassinary & Petty, 1992; Zanna, Kiesler & Pilkonis, 1970). Sometimes the stimulus is a direct, pleasant or unpleasant experience (e.g. presence or absence of a shock), and sometimes it is simply a word that has positive or negative association (e.g. ‘happy’ vs. ‘sad’). The stimuli evoke positive or negative affective responses , which in turn become linked in memory with the attitude object. So, whenever the attitude object is presented, the positive or negative affective response is recalled and experienced by association. As you might expect, results typically indicate that people come to like objects that are paired with positive stimuli morethan those that are paired with negative stimuli. This effect occurs even when the attitudes are measured in a different context.

For example, one clever experiment exposed participants to a series of names, each followed by a positive or negative word. In this list, (a) positive words were linked with the name ‘Ed’ and negative words with the name ‘George’ or (b) positive words were linked with the name ‘George’ and negative words with the name ‘Ed’ (Berkowitz & Knurek, 1969). Participants then went to an ostensibly unrelated experiment, where they had a brief discussion with two confederates. The confederates’ first names were George and Ed. Later, the confederates rated each participant’s friendliness towards them as an indication of their attitudes. As expected, the participants were friendlier (i.e. they had a more positive attitude) towards the confederate whose name had been paired with the positive stimuli.Effects of behaviour Initiation rituals have often been prerequisites for acceptance into social groups, such as military squads and college fraternities and sororities. Would-be new members may be asked to perform embarrassing acts, such as streaking nude at a public event or dressing in a strange costume during classes. Why do new recruits not leave a group after enduring such ordeals? One possible explanation is that the behaviour of submission to group rules leads to more positive attitudes towards the group. In other words, the new recruit’s behaviour affects his attitudes.

For many decades, the general effect of behaviour on attitudes has captured a great deal of interest. Researchers first began to notice an interesting effect arising from role-playing. For example, participants assigned to play the role of a person diagnosed with terminal lung cancer later reported more negative attitudes towards smoking than those who had listened to an audiotape of the roleplay ( Janis & Mann, 1965). Similarly, people assigned to debate a particular position on an issue such as legalized abortion subsequently express a more favourable attitude towards the position they have been required to advocate (e.g. Janis & King, 1954). People who merely listen to the participants’ arguments do not show so much attitude change. Something about the role-playing behaviour drives the change.What if the role-playing task explicitly requires counter-attitudinal advocacy – presenting an attitude or opinion that opposes the person’s previous attitude? Suppose university students are asked to write an essay arguing for increased tuition fees – a position that obviously contradicts most students’ feelings on this issue. Amazingly, they still tend to change their attitudes towards the position they have advocated (see Cooper & Fazio, 1984; Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999). Another interesting finding is that this attitude change is more likely when participants are given only a small incentive to argue the counterattitudinal position than when they are given a large incentive. counter-attitudinal advocacy presenting an attitude or opinion, within a roleplay context, which opposes the person’s initial attitudeSeveral theories help to explain this effect (e.g. Schlenker, 1982; Steele, 1988), but two are particularly prominent. On the one hand, cognitive dissonance theory suggests that a small incentive makes people feel guilt or tension from having acted, behaviourally, against their original attitude without sufficient reason.

To reduce their discomfort, they change their attitude (Festinger, 1957). This idea has also been used to explain the effects of initiation rituals. On the other hand, self-perception theory suggests that small incentives cause people to assume that their attitude must actually match the position they have advocated (Bem, 1972), because they can see no external reasons why they performed the behaviour. Current evidence suggests that both theories have some validity. Apparently, cognitive dissonance processes may occur when people perform a behaviour that strongly contradicts their initial attitude (like the tuition fees example), whereas self-perception processes may occur when people perform a behaviour that is not so strongly contradictory (Fazio, Zanna & Cooper, 1977). cognitive dissonance theory describes how people may feel an aversive tension when their behaviour is inconsistent with their attitude, and in order to reduce their discomfort, will change their behaviour to be consistent with their attitude self-perception theory indicates that people may guess their own attitude from their behaviour towards the attitude object, particularly when they can see no external reasons for the behaviour