Essays
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Attitude: Construction versus Disposition - Lord, Charles G.
Although Charles Darwin conceptualized attitudes as things that organisms do, many psychologists and laypeople today make the fundamental attribution error of conceptualizing attitudes as dispositions people have that make them do what they do. Recent attitudes research, however, has begun to explore the basic process by which people construct attitudes—a process that operates in the same way when answering general attitude questions as for any other evaluative response to an attitude object. In the basic evaluation process, the evaluator activates associations to the attitude object, perceives the implications of those associations, and bases evaluative responses at least in part on those implications. Instead of trying to measure a relatively stable disposition that predicts future behavior, the emerging research investigates influences on which associations get activated (e.g., chance, recency, and priming) and influences on how the activated associations are perceived (including subjective ease, the perceived source, and their perceived relevance). Interestingly, the two steps in the basic evaluation process parallel the two strategies that people use when they try to change their own attitudes. Emerging research directions that were suggested by conceptualizing attitudes as things people do, not what they have, include understanding the effects of evaluation goals on activating and perceiving associations, assessing attitude accuracy according to how adaptive are the attitudes that people take, and applying network theory to the basic evaluation process. -
Genetic Foundations of Attitude Formation - Kandler, Christian
Since the pioneering work of Eaves and Eysenck (1974) appeared in Nature some 40 years ago, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and behavioral geneticists have investigated the effects of nature and nurture on the formation of social attitudes. It has consistently been found that manifestations of social attitudes (i.e., preferences, values, and beliefs pertaining to things such as politics, religion and the treatment of ingroups and outgroups) are genetically influenced. More recently, researchers have focused their efforts on the psychophysiological pathways between gene activity and attitudes. In particular, a broad body of research examines how personality traits may be a link between genetic factors and political orientations. The latter are typically treated as either a single left–right dimension or divided into two core aspects: resistance to change/authoritarian conservatism and acceptance of inequality/social dominance orientation. In this essay, we provide an overview of this research, present some findings from our recent international behavioral genetic study on the topic, and identify key issues for future research. We suggest that future studies treat attitude formation as a complex process in which genetic factors and the psychophysiological phenomena that stem from them are affected by the surrounding social environment and culture. Such research will require (i) international study designs capturing individual and cultural levels of variation and (ii) interdisciplinary collaboration among scientists and researchers in various fields of study such as genetics, psychology, sociology, political science, neuroscience, and human biology. -
Implicit Attitude Measures - Mitchell, Gregory
Owing to concerns about the willingness and ability of people to report their attitudes accurately in response to direct inquiries, psychologists have developed a number of unobtrusive, or implicit, measures of attitudes. The most popular contemporary implicit measures equate spontaneous responses to stimuli with attitudes about those stimuli. Although these measures have been used to open important new lines of inquiry, they suffer from reliability and construct validity problems and administration limitations. Researchers conducting basic research on attitudes may fruitfully utilize implicit measures as part of a multipronged measurement strategy, but researchers seeking to predict behavior from attitudes should continue to rely on explicit measures of attitudes, taking care to minimize reactive bias and to formulate the attitude questions at the same level of specificity as the behavior to be predicted.