And I want you to know,
that if you come here, I am going to make it worth your time. But also practical
knowledge from me
is an important thing. You should be able to get something from this class you can use in your
daily life.
There's nobody here that don't got an attitude. Somebody got an attitude.
Got a good attitude, a bad attitude, an attitude pro this or con that. We all have
attitudes. Attitudes really
beliefs. Could be about people,
could be about objects, could be about ideas,
situations. They're evaluative in nature.
So, not all beliefs are evaluative in nature, right?
But in a way you think about it,
they kind of are if they're an attitude. So, I can have an attitude that today is a nice day
in terms of the temperature and I like rain.
People go, no, that's wrong, but really it's just my attitude that determines it. It's my
belief.
I evaluate whether rain is a good thing or a bad thing. Evaluating it is what makes
it
an attitude. It has a valence. Usually, it's towards
pro or towards con, based on experience, guides
our behaviors, but not all are behaviors. A lot of people think
that people will do things that are consistent
with the attitudes and beliefs that they hold. But the social psych chapter,
I hope will show you that's not always the case, and sometimes
it's clearly not the case. People sometimes act
in ways very different than you would predict if you knew their attitudes.
So, they have affective, meaning emotional,
they have behavioral, and cognitive or thinking
components, these attitudes, and we change attitudes
during our lives and we try to change other people's attitudes.
So, if you've ever had a political discussion, for example,
or a religious discussion, or even a discussion about where you want to eat
dinner tonight,
or what movie you want to see, you have two people
with different attitudes or similar attitudes. When they're similar,
it's pretty easy to resolve the discussions or the decisions.
When they're really different though, you run into conflict,
and people would like others to change their attitudes. We'll see that people like
consistency
and they like other people who are consistent with them. They like people
who are like themselves. Attitude change, the little triangle means change,
occurs via two routes. The central route
is for attitudes that are strongly held and are important to somebody.
So, the only way you're going to change that attitude
is with an important message. You're not going to change it
willy nilly, right? You've got to have some kind of a convincing argument.
Process with close attention and it's got to seem logical
and as we'll see it needs to come from a credible source. Otherwise, you'll just discount it right
off the bat. So, if you want to change somebody's deeply held
opinion, you need to have somebody
who has an important logical convincing
message and delivers it with authority that is deemed credible.
Otherwise, a person won't even pay attention to it, right? They'll just
dismiss it right off the bat. But there's a lot of attitudes we hold that really aren't
that strong
and they really aren't that important and they can be changed
through what's called the peripheral route, and the kinds of things that we see change
in the peripheral route are
more maybe people's preferences or whims but not something that they
hold deeply.
Now, the message is not that important. It might be given by an attractive
or expert source even though they don't have to be expert because it's somewhat
superficial.
You'll oftentimes see people that look like doctors pitching things on TV and
underneath it says, not an actual doctor, right? They're just wearing a lab coat
and that's enough. They don't actually have to have credibility.
They just have to appear credible, roughly speaking.
It doesn't have to receive a lot of attention but it changes attitude,
oftentimes though repetition. Most advertisements are played again
and again and again and again in the same time slots
hitting the same audience again and again
and again and people might change their opinions of things without even really realizing
they're doing it.
My favorite example is toothpaste. Are you really devoted to your toothpaste?
Is it the only toothpaste you'll ever use? You won't use another toothpaste and you won't hear
anybody slam your toothpaste, right, or
is it just toothpaste? Go to Walmart or any other big-box store
and go the toothpaste aisle. Normally, you just go get your brand, right,
and you don't really step back. But step back and look at how many
pastes there are for your teeth. There are tons and tons of pastes
for teeth,
but they only really have one active ingredient if we're talking about preventing
tooth decay and they all have it,
right? So, what would make you change toothpaste brands?
My guess is that it wouldn't take much. Maybe a sale,
or a friend saying try this or somebody who's pitching it on TV that you like.
Oh, my favorite actor uses this brand, so why not?
Why not indeed? Because it's not that important.
But if you want to change somebody's deeply held conviction,
that's not going to be easy to do. So, factors in changing attitudes, you'll want to
know these. One, I've already alluded to is the communicator.
Who is delivering the message? Is the communicator credible?
Does he have an agenda, or does she have
honesty, or does he have something to gain,
or is he or she attractive? Are they well-known? Are they popular?
Are they expert? Are they mature looking?
Looking mature swings elections.
They found that candidates who are deemed
to look mature get more votes, irrespective of their platforms.
People just want to believe that somebody is mature.
You think about the upcoming elections we have. They are always happening every
year or two years or four years. How deeply have you processed the actual candidates, right?
You think about the depth of your convictions
and people are like, yes, I believe this but then you look at their actions when they
go to the polls.
So, if you all are going to vote in the SGA elections,
who are you voting for? Do you even know who these people are,
and then often times we go to the polls maybe
to vote for a big ticket item like who we send to the United States
senate or house of representatives or executive branch,
but then we have all these local people we vote for too, and many times people
don't even
know who they are, but it doesn't stop them from voting
based on the label they see attached to it or whether the name sounds good or
interesting or whether they'd seen them in person.
So, one person has come up to me from a local election
and I now know that person. I'm more likely
to vote for them simply because what?
I don't know their opponent. I know them, not well,
but I've met them. So, those things sway us because, you see,
he looked like a credible guy to me. He seemed pretty honest.
I know he wants to gain office but it's not a high office and I think, well,
this is going to be more work for him than anything he could ever get out of it, right?
He's a good looking guy. I don't know him.
He wasn't popular but I actually quizzed him on a few things
that I thought people should know if elected for office and he had great answers
and he was a former Eagle Scout and I thought, you know,
that conveys information, doesn't it, because it tells me he's got a certain
maturity. Those are elements that we don't consciously process
but frequently unconsciously take note of and it sways us.
The communication itself, is it logical?
Is it clear? Is it convincing? Because
if you paid attention to any political discussion, for example,
what you'll see is both sides, both sides being left or right,
and this being America, I love all sides, right? You have a right to think whatever
you want to think.
But what you'll see is they often take very deep
different interpretations of the same occurrences.
Meaning, the facts
are seen differently, right? They're not different facts, theoretically.
They're different interpretations, and so
if I have an already deeply held opinion,
maybe it's a world view, maybe it's a political persuasion,
that's actually going to influence how I interpret facts and reality.
To change me from that position,
not that it's right or wrong to be in a position, don't get me wrong, but if you want to
change somebody that's already got a deeply held position,
then you better be logical, clear, and convincing. Is there a fear appeal?
We use fear appeals all the time, right? We have changed dramatically as a
country
and what we assume to be basic privacy rights and freedom rights since
9-11, right, because people saw a terrible, terrible occurrence
happen fairly randomly, right? Nobody saw it coming,
and there's a fear that it could happen again.
So we don't want it to happen again and we take
all manner of measures to prevent it. But how many
measures are too far or unnecessary? It's hard to know.
But if you have that fear, it's hard to process things
in a totally objective fashion because you're dealing with an
emotional aspect that doesn't necessarily lend itself to
logic. There's not a right answer.
All you can say is whether something did or didn't happen afterwards.
So, you can say, everything we've done has worked or maybe it's only been some subset of
what we've done has worked,
or if it happens, God forbid,
and all the stuff we thought was working didn't work, then we would only know then.
But we make big decisions about our lives, often times
not based on logic but based on emotion,
a way we feel and is it heard repeatedly?
Is it heard repeatedly? Is it heard repeatedly? Is it heard repeatedly?
In political advertisements, a lot of times, when you do the fact checking,
people will say, that's clearly not true, right?
But they say it again and again and again and again and again
and a lie told frequently enough oftentimes is perceived as truth.
How can they get away with it? Well, it's not a bold face lie,
but it's an interpretation of facts that seems really negative
and said again and again and again it becomes convincing,
even if it's not accurate. So, the communication.
The medium matters. The medium changes.
There used to be only one real medium and that was
face to face interaction. It was only after
the advent of the printing press right
that we started even getting literacy in society
and that was a long time coming, and in the 20th Century, most Americans could read
but we didn't have technologies in the early 20th Century that were widespread.
Radios, when they first came about, were luxury items.
Televisions were luxury items. Now radios and TVs are
normal. They come as standard units in cars.
Cars are normal, right? The face-to-face communication that this
young man came and was trying to meet people in the neighborhood is unusual
but that has a compelling element to it because I can turn off a radio,
I can tune out a TV, but when I have that face-to-face interaction,
it's harder to ignore that because now I have the power
of the in person process, face-to-face.
Print? Do people even get magazines and newspapers anymore? Of course they do but
not nearly as much as they used to.
Speec? Is that one that's going to be televised? What about
Youtube? What about internet?
Facebook is a good medium for some target audiences
but a poor medium for you, in general,
right, the 18-year-old crowd is easier to reach on a Celly app
than it is to reach on Facebook or Myspace, things that change really really
quickly.
Mediums used to be somewhat static. There was in person.
You could go see a speech, right, or you could watch it on TV and watch it on the radio but now
or hear it on the radio or read it in the paper. Now, we've got this electronic format
where we can
email people and we can text people and we can have them watch videos and all
manner of things.
Which one is most affective. It depends on your target
audience and your use of the medium.
Finally we got the audience. Who are you talking to, right?
If you've got an audience that is open to change,
then you have the possibility of changing their attitudes.
If you've got an audience that's entrenched, a mob
does not change its opinion very easily, right,
but not uncivilized, just a group of people.
If you have an audience of people who have already got a committed position, that
might be what brought them together as an audience.
To walk in with the opposite opinion and expect them to be open to the
notion that you have to
convey is not a very logical
or realistic thing to do. It's interesting, I watched a
seminar given by a physicist on
the moon landing myth,
right, where people believe that the moon landing
was a fake. Some people hold that belief deeply and they say, I can prove it
with all these elements. Well, his entire talk was showing
that those elements really aren't correct
That there's a good physical explanation for the shadow going this way or there
being a ripple in the flag, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
all the things that are used. He said, but what's amazing to me
is that after I go through all the science about everything that's used
as evidence to prove
that it was a hoax, I've dispelled all of that at the end of my talk, I still have
people come up to me and think it's a hoax.
That element of the audience was not open to change.
They had decided it was a hoax and no amount
of evidence to the contrary is going to be sufficient for them to believe
necessarily.
But if other people are like, I'm kind of on the fence. I don't know. Was it a hoax? Was it
real? Those people might be open to hearing it
as evidence, potentially.