Changing attitude is a key to changing goals.
A relatively enduring evaluation of an object, concept or behavior that predisposes a course of action.
- Positive to negative, good to bad, favorable to unfavorable
- Ambivalent attitudes-mixed evaluation Most People are ambivilent about most things. This is a maliable feeling.
Assumption is that attitudes are extremely enduring. Truth is that they vary in strength.
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Strong attitudes persist
- Based on direct experience - If you've had direct experience with something, you have more enduring attitudes.
- Based on a great deal of information - The more information that you have about something, the stronger it sticks.
- Are easily accessible - Trained attitudes become very strong attitudes because of initial reactions.
- Tied to values - Values are fundimental desires of right and wrong and people are extremely resitant to changing their values.
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Weak attitudes change easily
Age seems to have a big factor in this. Young people have less experience and are less committed to values. Middle aged people are the strongest attitudes. People become more ambivilent into old age.
- Direct experience - strongest form of learning.
- Vicarious experience - weakest form of learning.
- Temperament
- How you responded to stress. Calm/high-strung.
- Some attitudes are tied to temperment such as ones that involve harm to another person.
- Not all attitudes are tied to temperment.
- Sociobiology - gender
Cognitive component deals with beliefs.
- Beliefs about the outcomes associated with a behavior
- Beliefs about the characteristics of an object
Affective component is how something makes us feel.
- Behavior - I feel bad/good when I have to do something.
- Object - a person makes me feel bad/good.
Behavior component is the tendency to approach or avoid something. Habitual and may include indifference.
- Affect is typically the primary component for attitudes formed through direct experience.
- Cognition become relevant when asked information about the affect.
- When an object is present, affect is often the primary component.
Sometimes you can know something and feel differently.
- Example: Negative affect and behavior but positive cognition. Things I should do but I don’t like to do and avoid doing.
- Inconsistent attitudes are unstable.
- Creates a form of ambivilence.
- Often encountered in lifestyle and health changes.
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Attack the primary component
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Cognitive - provide reasons to change
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Affect - sensitization techniques
Mood overrides cognition. Can influence people by changing their mood on unaffected matters.
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Behavior - enabling
Make it easier for people to approach the situation. (Or make it more difficult to engage in habitiual bahavior to effect negative change.)
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Increased self-awareness
Making people aware of the reasons behind their attitudes can change their attitudes.
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Make a secondary component more salient
- Create an inconsistency among the components.
Assumption: Attitude is dictated by how functional it is to like something.
- People develop reasons to justify their behavior
- To convince them to change their behaviors, you must understand their reasons
- Once you understand their reasons, you must develop a strategy that attacks the specific reason that form the basis of their justifications.
- Instrumental function: I do it because I am rewarded for it.
- Arises from need deprivation and maintained through reinforcement. Extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation.
- Changed by withdrawing rewards, increasing punishment and demonstrating new and better ways for achieving rewards. Use of contingent rewards. Cost-benefit analysis.
- Instrumental focus creates negative affect.
- Social adjustment function: I do it because everyone else does it and I fit in better.
- Arises from strong need to be like others, need for affiliation and support. Self-monitors.
- Changed by demonstrating that the current behavior is out of step with others and that new behavior will allow you to fit in better. Use of survey information to demonstrate evaluative norms not by descriptive norms.
- Can affect whole organizations - Do things because other organizations do things.
- Information function: I do it because I know how to do it. I understand the process.
- Arises from need to predict what will happen in your environment, intolerance for ambiguity, need for closure.
- Changed by creating environmental ambiguity so that current behavior no longer fits the current circumstances. New tasks create for which new routines do not work.
- Add chaos in a predictable system.
- Best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
- Value expressive function: I do it because it is congruent with my value system.
- Arises from the desire to be consistent with your fundamental values. People who like to be consistent.
- Changed by demonstrating that the current actions are not consistent with the values and/or new ones are more consistent.
- People with the same values can be extremely different through perception.
- High self-monitors care very little about values. Low self-monitors care extremely about values.
- Ego defensive function: I do it because it allows me to avoid admitting negative aspects of myself.
- Arises from the desire to avoid acknowledging a bad aspect of self. People generally want to view themselves as being at least moderately good and want to avoid self-evaluation and/or bad feelings about self (e.g., guilty, shame).
- Changed through self-insight, confrontation with weakness followed with factors that increase self-efficacy.
- If you're bad at something, you tend to hate it to make yourself feel better about lack of skills.
- Successful strategy here is to form bonds with like-minded people and change things without sanction. Easier to do in small teams that can move quicker than people higher up can notice. Most organizational change happens this way.
- To counter micromanagement and central control, provide a distraction.
- Key to successful change.
- Match strategy to function. Mismatch makes it worse.
- Identifying functions takes inference from subtle indicators.
- Identify multiple functions. Could be more than one reason.
- Ego defensive is the hardest function to change.
- Compliance: People adopt new behaviors because they want to avoid punishments and gain rewards. Highly controlled environments.
- Works on principles of instrumentality.
- Ethical concerns with this sort of method of change. (Borg, 1984)
- Short-term gains for long-term morale loss.
- Sources: Means control communicators, the supervisors have the ability and motivation to use rewards.
- Condition: Create perceptions that choices are limited. Resistance is futile.
- Types of message: Delineate role requirements and incentive systems.
- Environment: Surveillance.
- Types of targets: External locus of control (people who believe that external forces control your behavior) or highly authoritarian individuals who accept the control of others.
- Types of organizations: Top-down environments, incentive driven. Para-military and prisons.
- Negatives: Bad morale, lack of voluntary action. No creativity, no initiative, no adaptability.
- To disrupt this style of organization: enable individuals, disrupt surveillance.
- Identification: People adopt new behaviors because they want to establish a relationship with someone they admire.
- Source: Attractive communicators, those who are like us, physically attractive, anyone we aspire to be like or with.
- Condition: Must have a salient relationship with the communicator.
- Types of message: Lay out what behaviors will establish the relationship.
- Environment: Access to communicator.
- Types of targets: Weak self-concepts, looking for meaning or success in their lives.
- Types of organizations: Those created and developed by charismatic or transformational leaders.
- Weaknesses: People tend not to remember arguments of very attractive people. Following based solely on attraction is weak against cognitive arguments.
- Strength: Absolute access.
- Internalization: People adopt new behaviors because they fit their value system.
- Source: Expert and trustworthy communicators
- Condition: Value fit
- Types of messages: Those that stress how the behavior flows from the values
- Environment: No competing messages from other sources.
- Types of targets: Low self monitors.
- Types of organizations: Those based on ASA theory (attraction-selection-attrition).
- Assumption: There are no messages that better fit the organizational values.
- Strength: People are willing to do voluntary work as long as it fits the values. Better change.
- Effectiveness.
- Compliance and identification produce short term change.
- Internalization produces long term change, but can create resistance to future change.
- Internalization flows from arguments whereas identification flows from source.
- Compliance requires the most effort and control.
- People express opinions that are socially appropriate and in this way project a more positive image of themselves.
- Socially appropriate opinions are those that are congruent with the expected opinions of others who are present.
- When expressing socially appropriate opinions, people may contradict their attitudes. Attitudes are internal evaluations of something whereas opinions are expression of attitudes toward others.
- When expressing opinions that contradict their attitudes, some people openly lie while some simply equivocate.
- Some people are more likely to engage in impression management than are others. Self-monitors, people who are high in public self-conscious.
- People will change their opinion in preperation of a persuasive conversation. If they are in favor of the person doing the persuasion, they will become more moderate. If they are not in favor, they will polarize.
- Through repeated exposure and/or thought, people come to have attitudes that guide their behavior in a given situation.
- When entering a situation, they look for cues that will tell them what they should do.
- These salient cues active the typical attitude that they have learned fits the situation.
- Once activated, the attitude guides their actions until the situation changes.
- This process allows people to quickly respond to recurring situations.
- The key to changing behavior is to have people unlearn old attitudes and learn new attitudes. The old way thinking vs. the new way.
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The outcomes of a course of action can be framed in one of two ways
- Gain frames focus on the benefits of doing something.
Example: the gains resulting from doing something new.
- Loss frames focus on what is lost by doing something.
Example: the resource used to get something new.
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The way a message is framed influences risk.
- When things are framed as gains, people become risk averse and will choose safe options.
- When things are framed as losses, people become risk takers and will choose risky options.
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Example: Health care
- Health exams are considered risky since something bad might be diagnosed. Hence, loss frames are more persuasive than are gain frames.
- Change in lifestyle is not considered risky since the person is not yet sick. It is preventative. Hence, gain frames are more persuasive than are loss frames.
- Types of norms
- Descriptive norms: What most people do. Surveys
- Injunctive norms: What most people think should be done. Has an evaluative component.
- Descriptive norms often legitimatize and reinforces bad behavior whereas evaluative norms condemn it.
- To change behavior, you have to do one of two things.
- Demonstrate that the target’s behavior is contrary to descriptive norms.
- Show that the target’s behavior is contrary to evaluative norms.
Anti-change theory. Generally an initial reaction that needs to be ridden out.
- People want to have the ability to control their decision making.
- Cultural value, especially in the United States.
- When their freedom to control their decision making is threatened, they become motivationally aroused (i.e., they feel psychological reactance).
- The focus of psychological reactance is to restore decision freedom.
- Conditions that produce the most reactance. (Doesn't always occur)
- Forceful communication: highly direct, imperative with lots of intense nonverbal.
- One-sided message rather than two-sided.
- No justifications for the change. Mandates.
- Internal rather than external locus of control.
- Having performed the behavior before that is being taken away.
- Self-competence
- Importance of the behavior.
- The extent of restriction
- Culture: Individualistic vs. collectivistic society
- Lack of illusion of choice. "But you know at the end, it's your choice."
- Behavioral Reactions
- We do the exact opposite.
- Encourage others to resist. Start a movement.
- You think more about the threatened behavior and see it as better than the new one.
- Show a lack of respect or disregard for the new behavior. Very passive aggressive.
- Act like you could engage in the behavior if you wanted.