Attitude Strengthening
Attitude Strengthening - Related Videos
01:54
Attitudes
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2020
Attitude is our evaluation of a person, an idea, or an object. We have attitudes for many things ranging from products that we might pick up in the supermarket to people around the world to political policies. Typically, attitudes are favorable or unfavorable: positive or negative (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). And, they have three components: an affective component (feelings), a behavioral component (the effect of the attitude on behavior), and a cognitive component (belief and knowledge;...
09:26
Persuasion: Motivational Factors Influencing Attitude Change
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2023
Source: William Brady & Jay Van Bavel—New York University Decades of social psychological research sought to understand a fundamental question that pervades our social life including politics, marketing and public health; namely, how are people persuaded to change their attitudes towards an idea, person, or object? Traditional work found that there are key factors that influence whether persuasion is successful or not including the source of the persuasive message ("source"), and the...
02:12
Relationship Formation
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2020
What do you think is the single most influential factor in determining with whom you become friends and whom you form romantic relationships? You might be surprised to learn that the answer is simple: the people with whom you have the most contact. This most important factor is proximity. You are more likely to be friends with people you have regular contact with. For example, there are decades of research that shows that you are more likely to become friends with people who live in your dorm,...
07:35
The Multi-group Experiment
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2023
Source: Laboratories of Gary Lewandowski, Dave Strohmetz, and Natalie Ciarocco—Monmouth University A multi-group design is an experimental design that has 3 or more conditions/groups of the same independent variable. This video demonstrates a multi-group experiment that examines how different interethnic ideologies (multiculturalism and color-blind) influence feelings about diversity and actions toward and out-group member. In providing an overview of how a researcher conducts a multi-group...
05:59
Self-report vs. Behavioral Measures of Recycling
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2023
Source: Laboratories of Gary Lewandowski, Dave Strohmetz, and Natalie Ciarocco—Monmouth University One of the challenges in measuring an experimental variable is identifying the technique that will produce the more accurate measurement. The most common way to measure a dependent variable is self-report—asking the participant to describe his/her feelings, thoughts, or behaviors. Yet, people may not be honest. To truly know something about a participant, it may be necessary to see what they...
FAQs
Repeatedly thinking about or expressing an attitude can strengthen it by encouraging elaboration, meaning more extensive consideration of the judgment and its supporting thoughts. This repeated engagement can make the evaluation more stable and intense while strengthening connections between the attitude and the beliefs or emotions beneath it. Those links may make later change more difficult.
Personal relevance gives an attitude greater importance in relation to a person’s experiences, while social reinforcement can support the person’s existing evaluation. Together, these influences may encourage continued engagement with the attitude and its supporting beliefs. As that engagement increases, the judgment can become more firmly maintained and more resistant to information that challenges it.
Information can strengthen an attitude when it increases a person’s confidence in the judgment. Greater confidence supports a more secure connection between the evaluation and the beliefs or emotions underlying it. The result is not merely repeated exposure to the same opinion, but stronger certainty that the evaluation is justified, which can contribute to stability and resistance to change.
Stronger attitudes often provide better indications of how a person may act because they are more stable and more closely connected to underlying beliefs and emotions. This makes attitude strength relevant to decisions such as health choices, where researchers examine how evaluations relate to behavioral outcomes. The relationship is useful for understanding behavior, even though an attitude is not itself an action.
These areas involve evaluations that may become increasingly stable, intense, and difficult to change. Studying the processes that support strengthening, including repeated thought, personal relevance, social reinforcement, and confidence-building information, helps psychology examine why some judgments persist. The same framework can therefore inform research on persuasive communication, polarized views, and prejudicial evaluations.
Interventions may focus on the experiences and reasoning that keep an evaluation strong rather than treating the attitude as an isolated judgment. Examining its supporting beliefs, emotions, personal relevance, social reinforcement, and confidence can identify processes that maintain it. This approach is relevant to behavioral change because altering those sustaining influences may reduce resistance to new perspectives or actions.