Talk:Attitude change

The same material on processing models (ELM, etc.) appears twice in the article. I don't want to make changes myself because I know very little about this subject and what would be the best arrangement... :-( 79.181.136.53 (talk) 22:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

For a May 2005 deletion debate over this page see Votes for deletion/Attitude change

Proposal to make the following changes
I am a student at Carnegie Mellon University. As part of a class assignment, my team partner and I would like to edit this article in order to bring the quality of this article to meet the standards of a good wikipedia article. The following illustrate the changes that we plan to make:

Content and Structure

- We agree with Robertekraut's (comment made on Feb. 3, 2011) that the current article mostly focuses on emotional components affecting attitude change. We will like to include cognitive components so that this article will have an equal emphasis on each.

- Add in different theories on attitude change, based on reviews of literature and meta-analyses suggested by Robertekraut on Feb. 3, 2011.

- Organize article into sections based on theories.

- Include real-world applications for each theory of attitude change.

- Eliminating unnecessary detail by providing link of keyword to another wikipedia article.

- Include any relevant images that pertain to the content.

Citations and References

- Use Wikipedia appropriate methods of citations and references for the existing references, as well as any new references that will be used in our edits.

- Link important and relevant terms. If some parts of the content require further detail, link important terms to the content rather than expanding too much within the article.

We welcome any comments or feedback on our proposal.

Jipinghe (talk) 05:03, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Cognitive Dissonance
Shouldn't Cognitive Dissonance feature heavily in this article, rather than those other less accepted theories? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.42.85.98 (talk) 22:22, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

"spider-like"
From leading paragraph. Does this, without quotes in the article, constitute "encyclopaedic tone"? How are associations like a spider? A spider *web* would make much more sense, but even then it seems like quotes would be appropriate. Laurosaur (talk) 15:15, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Article is very incomplete
This article is very incomplete and seems to disproportionately emphasize emotions and emotional appeals. While the article mentions in passing "mportant factors that influence the impact emotion appeals include self efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features." Emotion appeals are not the only route to attitude change. The article doesn't touch on any of the message or source features, either as they influence the success of emotional appeals or more broadly.

There have been a number of recent reviews of the literature and meta-analyzes that could be used as a basis of completeness:

Petty, R., & Briñol, P. Attitude change. Advanced Social Psychology: The State of the Science, 217.

Witte, K., & Allen, M. (2000). A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns. Health Education & Behavior, 27(5), 591.

Kraus, S. (1995). Attitudes and the prediction of behavior: A meta-analysis of the empirical literature. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(1), 58.

Wilson, E., & Sherrell, D. (1993). Source effects in communication and persuasion research: A meta-analysis of effect size. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 21(2), 101-112.

Wood, W. (2000). Attitude change: Persuasion and social influence. Annual Review of Psychology, 51(1), 539-570.

Also the article is missing the applications of attitude change in public service announcement, health campaigns, advertising and the like.

Bator, R. J., & Cialdini, R. B. (2000). The application of persuasion theory to the development of effective proenvironmental public service announcements. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 527-541. Robertekraut (talk) 20:54, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Continuation of Improvement
We plan to add in/revise sections:

Instead of having the current first paragraph, revise to:

Attitudes are not stable, and are often subject to change by social influence. Many factors can impact one’s attitude, leading to attitude change, such as cognitive dissonance, persuasive communications, and playing to people’s emotions. These factors have been categorized into the behavioral, cognitive, and affective-based components of attitude change.

and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components.

Include some specific theories and models (yet to fully research yet) in paragraphs thereafter: Behavior-Based Attitude Change People’s attitude changes when they behave inconsistently with their attitudes and cannot justify their behavior through external means. The lack of external justification of a person’s inconsistent behavior leads to an internal justification of the behavior. This is known as the Cognitive Dissonance Theory (link), which is “a drive or feeling of discomfort, originally defined as being caused by holding two or more inconsistent cognitions and subsequently defined as being caused by performing an action that is discrepant from one’s customary, typically postiive self-conception.” (CITE: Aronson, 150) Cognitive dissonance is useful in changing attitudes of individuals or small numbers of people, by having people perform a task and behave in a way that goes against their attitude towards the attitude topic. For example, by asking smokers to give a speech on why smoking is harmful to the body, the smokers are performing a task that goes against their attitude towards smoking with little to no external justifications.

…. Using cognitive dissonance is useful to change the attitudes of individuals or small groups of people. In order to

Cognition-Based Attitude Change

Elaboration Likelihood Model Dual Mode Processing Models of Persuasion

Affect-Based Attitude Change

It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotion node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined. In primarily affective networks, it is more difficult to produce cognitive counterarguments in the resistance to persuasion and attitude change (Eagly & Chaiken, 1995)

Include three paragraphs specifying factors: Attitudinal Advocacy Attitudinal Advocacy aims to see what a person’s attitudes towards a particular issue or position, and anything contrary to his or her primary beliefs is called counterattitudinal advocacy (Chaiken et. al). Different research such as Role-Playing Research, and Causal Attributions show that a person believes that their behavior stems from an inducing force, not their underlying attitude (Chaiken et. al). Other factors that shape attitudinal advocacy include Shared Reality in Communications.

Message-Based Persuasion Message-Based Persuasion stems from the notion that people’s attitudes may be influenced based on other people’s cognitive advocacies (Chaiken et. al). The information that they receive from others and what they observe has the ability to change their attitudes. Motivational and affective processes influence message-based persuasion, for example, the Elaboration Likelihood Model by Petty and Cacioppo’s (1981, 1986) describes the process of how people tend to follow a centralized route to persuasion when motivation is high, whereas they choose a peripheral route when motivation is low.

Social Influence Within social contexts, interpersonal roles are more emphasized whereas Message-Based Persuasions and Attitudinal Advocacy are from intrapersonal motivations. Social reality have the power to motivate one’s attitudes. The dual-motive scheme relates to Festinger’s (1950) idea 1that society has the power to pressure people to change from group communications. In a study by Deutsch and Gerard (1955), it demonstrated that individuals were more likely to make judgments with others because of normative motives. They were found to show greater conformity to one another when they believed their group would be rewarded for successful task performance (Chaiken et. al). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cmumelee (talk • contribs) 17:34, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Radical changes have been implemented
Hello, In a previous posting I have proposed radical plans to edit and improve this article to meet Wikipedia standards of a good article. We have implemented the proposed plans and here is a summary of the changes we have made: -Radically reorganized the overall structure so the article. The current article acts aggregates various theories and models related to attitude change, and presents them in a logical way. Another goal to the structure change was for the article to also act as a portal to other wikipedia articles relating to the theories of attitude change. -Expanded the original emotion focused content to include more on cognitive related attitude changes, HSM, and cognitive dissonance. -Changed original citations to meet Wikipedia standards of in-text citations.

Any feedback is welcomed!

Jipinghe (talk) 18:05, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
 * A very welcome improvement: well done! Really pleasing to see so much content based on reliable academic sources. I haven't time for a full review, but I see that some sentences need another look, e.g. "Liking has shown that if one likes an opposite party, the individual is more inclined to carry out a favor", "Research has suggested multiple routes that cognitive dissonance can be reduced." - perhaps the latter should be "multiple ways in which people can reduce cognitive dissonance"? It would be worth going through making sure that any technical terms are defined and/or wikilinked. E.g. the sentence, "Other methods include concept or network mapping, and using primes or word cues" is factually correct, but for Wikipedia's general audience, who can't be assumed to know about psychology, it will be confusing. MartinPoulter (talk) 20:29, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

Incomplete reference
One of the footnotes is "Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz (1978)" but without any further details. It would be great to have full details of the reference. Some other footnotes seem to have a simlar issue. MartinPoulter (talk) 20:14, 9 May 2011 (UTC)