 This is lecture seven of social psychology in this lecture. We'll be talking about attitudes and In the first part of this lecture, we're gonna talk about the nature of attitudes. So what are attitudes? Let me interstate by this by by showing you some pictures here. You see an iPhone This is coriander Well, this guy. I think you are all you all know him Vladimir Putin and these are very famous French fries So my guess is that at least with one of these pictures or maybe even with all of these pictures You immediately have this sense of like or dislike. You immediately know what how we feel about it Whether you like the iPhone. Yes or no, whether you like the taste of coriander. Yes or no Well, our feelings about this guy here in the picture are I think pretty straightforward And whether you like going to McDonald's or not So these are all objects objects that we can feel a certain way towards and the way we feel towards these objects are called attitudes so attitudes are basically our General evaluation of an attitude object and an attitude object can be anything it can be a person it can be An object it can be an idea or even a theory So you can also have an attitude towards social psychology towards the lectures that I'm giving maybe you like them maybe you don't like them so you can have an attitude towards them and Attitude is actually a topic that we've been discussing in previous lectures, but I never really explicitly mentioned the word attitude So we discussed attitudes in the previous lecture when we talked about cognitive dissonance So if we have a certain attitudes towards for example climate change and our behaviors are not in line with that Then we experienced the feeling of dissonance. So and also we talked about the self, right? We talked about how we feel about ourselves our general evaluation of ourselves Which is captured in our self-esteem and our self-esteem is actually also an attitude It's the attitude we have towards us towards the the person you see when you look in the mirror so attitudes are studied a lot and and they are studied because We as psychologists, but also as laypeople we have an idea that our attitudes are a strong predictor of our behavior So if we know how people feel about something We also know how they will behave and this is a topic that we'll be talking a lot about in this lecture But first let me dive into the theory of attitudes a little bit more So our attitudes are a general evaluation, but they consist of several parts There's a part of cognition and the cognitive part of an attitude basically means what knowledge do you have about it? How much do you know about something? But we also have feelings so we also have an effective response and that is do you feel positive or negative about it? And finally we also have behavior So do you tend to approach this object or person or do you tend to avoid it? So these are the three different components as you wish of attitudes And it's also important to know that for some attitudes, they are more cognitively based So for example a certain type of vacuum cleaner You may not have very strong feelings towards your vacuum cleaner, but you know it when you buy one You know something about it So you can start looking up information and read reviews on a vacuum cleaner But this is a vacuum cleaner is pretty much a cognitive base. So it's a cognitive based condition But some topics are more affect based they give you very strong feelings strong feelings of like or dislikes And that's probably for the pictures I showed you earlier on probably immediately have this sense of oh I like this or I don't like it or I hate it even So some topics are more affect based and if it's more affect based it often has to do something with our morals So for example, if we see Vladimir Putin, we may have a very strong feeling of dislike Maybe even hate because we really this descent, you know, we feel like what he's doing Or and how he's treating people and how he's treating his own people in Russia and people from Ukraine We have very strong feelings about that. So this is a more an affect based cognition And then finally some attitudes are more behavioral based. We don't really think about it We just do it for example hiking you might be hiking quite a lot and this is behavior You show maybe you don't really think about doing this is just something you do So this is more a behaviorally based attitude But all attitudes consist of these three different components a question that you may have is where do these attitudes come from? Well, there's actually several different sources of our attitudes and I will discuss them with you now So first of all genetics. That's an interesting first First component of where attitudes come from. So there's some evidence that that How we feel about some things our attitudes are partly genetic and this has been shown for example in research With identical twins that don't grow up together. So they they they live in separate houses. They don't interact, but they still Have some sort of similarity in the things they like and dislike So these two girls well, they know each other clearly But if they won't wouldn't be able to grow up together They grow up in different households. Maybe they both would have the same hobby when they grow up And this is of course also because they share temperament They share parts of their personality because they're identical twins And your personality is also a predictor of your attitudes. So for example, if you are a very enthusiastic person you're very Extroverted then you might also really like to go out and you have a very positive attitudes towards going out and visiting bars Well, if you're more introverted you may dislike this So part of how what our attitudes are is captured in our genes but secondly Maybe even more importantly Social learning so we talked in the very first lecture about what social learning is social learning is the many ways in which We learn about ourselves in the world around us through our role models and Mostly our parents are very strong strong role models for us and the attitudes that your parents have they pass it on to you That's really likely So if your parents are for example religious and you have a very strong attitudes towards a positive attitudes towards going to church There's quite a high likelihood that you will also grow up to be a religious person yourself or and you see this Here very clearly so if your parents are for example farmers and even feel a very strong way about certain Decisions made by politicians, then they also pass this on to their children Basically putting their attitudes up on their children So we learn our own attitudes from watching our role models and our role models are Instructing us about their own attitudes, but it's also more subtle So it's not only if your parents tell you to go to church For example that you develop an attitude towards going to church But it's also by watching your parents and this is also called modeling So for example, if you have a mother that is really fun of yoga and does this yoga exercises every day Even if she's not putting it on you So even if she's not stimulating you to do yoga just by watching her there's quite a high likelihood that you will also End up being enthusiastic about doing yoga yourself Because we learn through imitation we watch our caregivers and we do what they do We copy them. That's basically how our children are raised more so than by the explicit instructions We give them is more by showing them behavior that they will later on copy. So genetic social learning But there's also that's this is all basically captured in either your genes or or what your parents put on you But also your own experience apart from your parents also have an impact on your attitude So your own behavior for example, this is something we discussed in lecture five when we talked about self perception theory You remember so if we are uncertain about what we feel about something we can look at our own behavior and Then estimate how we feel about something. So this is primarily the case for more behaviorally based attitudes So if someone asks you how do you feel about hiking you think about the times that you went out and went hiking? I think oh, I really enjoyed being in nature, and I really enjoyed it. Yeah, and I guess I do it quite often Yes, I like hiking so our own behavior gives us information about our attitude something we saw before But also our experiences When interacting with with certain attitude objects can give us can sort of form and shape our attitudes and this can happen in multiple ways first of all through classical conditioning and With classical condition and we've referred to if something happens something that is in itself neutral But it's paired with an emotional response Then after a while you can start to develop an attitudes towards this neutral stimulus as well So let me illustrate this with with an example if you go to the dentist There's oftentimes this very specific smell. It smells really clean, but also like maybe a bit artificial But there's a very pronounced smell when you go to the dentist I think you can all you know remember this this smell right the smell in and of itself is maybe not really bad It can be you know interpreted as a neutral smell in the beginning But after a while you start linking this this smell the smell of cleaning products dental cleaning products with The treatments that you get while you are at the dentist and sometimes these treatments are of course not pleasurable at all Oftentimes they are even hurting you and after a while just smelling this very specific dental product smell Can immediately give you this this negative feeling because of the experience of classical conditioning So the neutral stimulus the smell the dentist is sort of combined With the experience of going to the dentist and after a while you start hating the smell Even if you don't have to go to the dentist yourself So this is learning through classical conditioning The second way of learning is through operant conditioning and operant conditioning is if you perform a certain behavior Which is later either rewarded or punished then you learn that some behavior is Behavior that is positive and that you should show and other behavior is behavior that is negative So there's some sort of reinforcement later by a third party often times again your parents or your teachers that for example reward you or punish you while you show certain behavior and so for example for this kid he knows that if he Goes to visit his family all day, which is maybe sometimes a bit boring for him But then he comes home and he gets this this delicious lollipop because he's been such a good boy So this is rewarding a kid for showing certain behavior Then he will develop a more positive attitudes towards this behavior So we learned through classical conditioning and operant conditioning But there's a third way this that is actually not in the book chapter But I think it's important for you to know and that is that we also learned through mere exposure Merely being exposed to a certain attitude object changes our attitudes and I will show you this by the By explaining the following study that has been done on the mere exposure effect In this study participants came into the lab They were placed behind a computer screen and they were watching neutral objects that are displayed in the screen These objects didn't mean anything for them These were either for example Chinese characters and these these participants were not Chinese So they couldn't breathe these characters or maybe Turkish words So some things that they were meaningless to them and some of the words or characters were displayed Many times and others were displayed just once or twice So the frequency with which these objects were displayed differed Some were displayed a lot and others not and then at the very end of the study each of these objects were shown on the screen one by one And participants were asked to rate What they felt about the object and again all these objects look pretty much the same They were really neutral so maybe you wouldn't expect that to be any difference at all But there was a difference and what this research showed was for the objects that were shown many times They were rated more positively than the objects that were rated that were showed less Frequently so the more we see something the more we start liking it and this is what the mere exposure effect Means it means that we are liking for something increases to the extent that we have seen it more often And this is also something we can experience in in daily life for example Let's take me I am a huge Beyonce fan and she just when she drops a new album every time I listen to it and the very first time I listen to the album. I'm oftentimes not super excited to begin with I'm like I listen to the album. I'm like, okay. Yeah, this is okay I like this song maybe not really like this song and then I repeat it because I'm a fan So I just continue listening to the album and after a few times. I'm like, yeah, I really like this I like it more and then after repeating it over and over again. I'm like, this is my favorite album This is the best album she ever, you know brought out So the more often you listen to a song the more you start liking it And I think this is also something that we can Recognize ourselves when you hear a song on the radio for the first time Then you may not have very strong feelings towards it But if you if it's repeated then you start liking it more and more up to a certain point Up to a certain point because if it's too much like I have with this wonderful song happy by Pharrell Williams I really like the song but not anymore. It's been too much shown. This is called overexposure So in the beginning there's sort of a steep line that we start liking something more up to a certain point If it's overexposed then we start liking it less again Something to keep in mind by the way for the the mere exposure effect It only works if it's either the object is neutral or it is already a little bit positive to begin with So for example with the Chinese characters or the Turkish words, they were completely neutral You didn't feel any way about it. You don't know what they mean for the Beyonce album I'm already a little bit positive because I'm a Beyonce fan But if you immediately dislike something the mere exposure effect doesn't work Okay, so if you immediately hate a song repeating it probably won't really help you liking it more Okay, so these are the three different ways in which we learn through experience And now we know we have a sense of how our attitudes are developed But now we want to measure them and as psychologists as scientists We of course are very interested in measuring people's attitudes and we can do so in multiple ways first of all We can measure explicit attitudes through questionnaires and let me first explain to you what an explicit attitude is an explicit attitude Means an attitude that we consciously endorse and can easily report. So something that I'm very Articulated on I know how I feel about it. I can explain it and I can also report it So if I want to know how a person feels about something I can simply ask them straightforward, right? So for example, I could ask you To agree or disagree with the following statements I think Mark Rutter is a good prime minister then you can either Strongly disagree you can say undecided. I don't know or you can strongly agree So you can report your explicit attitudes on a questionnaire like this But interestingly, we don't only have explicit attitudes We also have implicit attitudes and implicit attitudes are attitudes that exists pretty much outside of awareness We don't really know it we feel it in our body But we don't really we had don't we cannot consciously report this and we'll be talking more about implicit attitudes later But for now just keep in mind that you have to measure them differently So implicit attitudes cannot be measured through questionnaires because they're not conscious They are subconscious is sort of a general more effect based experience and we can measure them for example by using Physiological measures like measuring skin conductance and which you can do then for example if I want to know some someone's implicit attitudes about Spiders what I can then do is then hook them up on this skin conductance measurements And I can show them spiders and I can see how their body responds So if a person really dislikes spiders and have this tendency to avoid spiders or have spider phobia Then we can we know that their palms will get more sweaty And this is an indication of having a strong attitudes implicit attitudes towards something an attitude of dislike in this case So we can use physiological measures or we can use an implicit association test and this is something I'll come back to in lecture 13, but just keep in mind that this is a way of measuring implicit attitudes So when we talk about attitudes, it's important to keep in mind that not all attitudes are as important to us So this depends on how accessible this attitude is and this is again something we talked about before for some topics or some You know Attitude objects are not so important to you So you don't feel a very strong way about it other topics We have very strong feelings about and research are also often interested in knowing how Accessible a certain attitude is so how strongly people feel about it So for example, if I want to know how strongly people feel about our prime minister over here Then you can say Margaret is a good prime minister and then you can you know you you're interested in the answer But you're also interested in how quickly people respond. So You see this in the screen. You have to respond as quickly as possible by saying yes or no So we measure the reaction times and we know if a person says for example, yes in half a second That's an indication for a stronger attitude than if a person says yes in let's say two seconds So this the faster person Response the stronger this person feels about a certain attitude object in this case mark rhythm So and of course the idea is if we have a stronger a feeling about something or someone This will be a better indication of our behavior and this is also the case So for the people that really feel very strongly about mark Rütte have a very strong association That will probably influence their voting behavior And if we have a weaker attitudes then our attitude is oftentimes not a very good predictor of our behavior So in the next part of this lecture, we'll be talking more about the complicated relationship between our attitudes and our behavior That's it for now