KEY THEME

An attitude is a learned tendency to evaluate objects, people, or issues in a particular way.

KEY QUESTIONS

Should high school graduation requirements include a class on basic sex education, birth control methods, and safe sex? Should there be a compulsory military or community service requirement for all young adults? Should there be national health care coverage for all U.S. citizens? Should the government be doing more to prepare for climate change?

On these and many other subjects, you’ve probably formed an attitude. Psychologists formally define an attitude as a learned tendency to evaluate some object, person, or issue in a particular way (Banaji & Heiphetz, 2010; Bohner & Dickel, 2011). Attitudes are typically positive or negative, but they can also be ambivalent, as when you have mixed feelings about an issue, person, or group (Costarelli, 2011).

As shown in FIGURE 12.1, attitudes can include three components. First, an attitude may have a cognitive component: your thoughts and conclusions about a given topic or object. For example, Emil is an art lover. He often tells his friends that, in his opinion, visiting galleries and museums makes people calmer and more content, and encourages people to be more open to new experiences. Second, an attitude may have an emotional or affective component, as when Emil talks excitedly about how happy and energized he is after seeing the latest exhibition of Jeff Koons’ art. Finally, an attitude may have a behavioral component, in which attitudes are reflected in action. In Emil’s case, he visits museums regularly and donates to an organization that introduces schoolchildren to the arts.

Along with forming attitudes toward objects, ideas, or political campaigns, we also form attitudes about people. The In Focus box “Interpersonal Attraction and Liking” discusses some of the factors that affect the thoughts and feelings that we develop about other people.

Intuitively, you probably assume that your attitudes tend to guide your behavior. But social psychologists have consistently found that people don’t always act in accordance with their attitudes. For example, you might disapprove of cheating yet find yourself peeking at a classmate’s exam paper when the opportunity presents itself. Or you might strongly favor a certain political candidate yet not vote on election day.

When are your attitudes likely to influence or determine your behavior? Social psychologists have found that you’re most likely to behave in accordance with your attitudes when:

Clearly, your attitudes do influence your behavior in many instances. Now, consider the opposite question: Can your behavior influence your attitudes?

Suppose you have volunteered to participate in a psychology experiment. At the lab, a friendly experimenter asks you to indicate your degree of preference for a variety of foods, including fried grasshoppers, which you rank pretty low on the list. During the experiment, the experimenter instructs you to eat some fried grasshoppers. You manage to swallow three of the crispy critters. At the end of the experiment, your attitudes toward grasshoppers as a food source are surveyed again.

Later in the day, you talk to a friend who also participated in the experiment. You mention how friendly and polite you thought the experimenter was. But your friend had a different experience. He thought the experimenter was an arrogant, rude jerk.

Here’s the critical question: Whose attitude toward eating fried grasshoppers is more likely to change in a positive direction? Given that you interacted with a friendly experimenter, most people assume that your feelings about fried grasshoppers are more likely to have improved than your friend’s attitude. In fact, it is your friend—who encountered the obnoxious experimenter—who is much more likely to hold a more positive attitude toward eating fried grasshoppers than you.

At first glance, this finding seems to go against the grain of common sense. So how can we explain this outcome? The fried grasshoppers story represents the basic design of a classic experiment by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues (1965). Zimbardo’s experiment underscored the importance of cognitive dissonance, a phenomenon first identified by social psychologists Leon Festinger and J. Merrill Carlsmith (1959). Cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state of psychological tension (dissonance) that occurs when there’s an inconsistency between two thoughts or perceptions (cognitions). This state of dissonance is so unpleasant that we are strongly motivated to reduce it (Festinger, 1957, 1962; Gawronski, 2012).

Cognitive dissonance commonly occurs in situations in which you become uncomfortably aware that your behavior and your attitudes are in conflict (Cooper, 2012). In these situations, you are simultaneously holding two conflicting cognitions: your original attitude versus the realization your behavior contradicts that attitude. If you can easily rationalize your behavior to make it consistent with your attitude, then any dissonance you might experience can be quickly and easily resolved. But when your behavior cannot be easily justified, how can you resolve the contradiction and eliminate the unpleasant state of dissonance? Since you can’t go back and change the behavior, you change your attitude to make it consistent with your behavior.

Let’s take another look at the results of the grasshopper study, this time from the perspective of cognitive dissonance theory. Your attitude toward eating grasshoppers did not change. Why? Because you could easily rationalize the conflict between your attitude (“Eating grasshoppers is disgusting”) and your behavior (eating three grasshoppers). You probably justified your behavior by saying something like, “I ate the grasshoppers because I wanted to help out the nice experimenter.” However, your friend, who encountered the rude experimenter, can’t use that rationalization. Thus, he experiences an uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance. Since he can’t go back and change his behavior, he is left with the only part of the equation that can be changed—his attitude (see FIGURE 12.2). “You know, eating those grasshoppers wasn’t that bad,” your friend comments. “In fact, they were kind of crunchy.” Notice how his change in attitude reduces the dissonance between his previous attitude and his behavior. And he might not have even realized that his attitude had changed.

Research from social neuroscience suggests that cognitive dissonance can lead to attitude change quickly, perhaps without us even realizing that the process is occurring. Difficult decisions are often followed by an attitude change that favors the object or outcome chosen. Brain scans show changes in the parts of the brain associated with distress, arousal, emotion, and conflict within seconds after a person makes a difficult decision, which may indicate the discomfort produced by the change in attitude (Jarcho & others, 2010; van Veen & others, 2009).

This response to cognitive dissonance does not seem to be unique to adults. Louisa Egan and her colleagues (2007) have seen dissonance among four-year-old children who are forced to choose between two stickers—a dolphin sticker and a dragonfly sticker, for example—that they previously liked equally. These researchers observed the same effect among capuchin monkeys who were forced to choose between two colors of M&Ms that they previously liked equally. After choosing one, the monkeys preferred the chosen M&M color from then on (Egan & others, 2007). In both cases, it was not just that they had previously spent time with the chosen sticker or chosen M&M. When researchers chose for them, their preferences remained the same.

Attitude change due to cognitive dissonance is quite common in everyday life. For example, consider the person who impulsively buys a new leather coat that she really can’t afford. “It was too good a bargain to pass up,” she rationalizes. Similarly, researchers have found that people who quit smoking offered fewer rationalizations for smoking. But if they started smoking again, they started rationalizing again, saying, for example, that “you’ve got to die of something, so why not enjoy yourself and smoke” (Fotuhi & others, 2013).

Cognitive dissonance also influences how we frame decisions we have made when we have chosen between two alternatives, such as which college to attend. After you make a choice, you emphasize the negative features of the choice you’ve rejected, which is commonly called a “sour grapes” rationalization. You also emphasize the positive features of the choice to which you have committed yourself—a “sweet lemons” rationalization.