Difficulty: Intermediate | Prerequisites: Social Cognition and Multi-Level Analysis notes
Attitudes are one of the most studied constructs in social psychology, and for good reason: they sit at the junction between what we think and what we do. This unit asks how attitudes are formed, measured, and changed, and critically examines whether attitudes predict behaviour at all. It also introduces cognitive dissonance, one of the field's most influential theories, and applies attitude concepts to stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. If you are coming in cold, make sure you understand schemas and processing routes from the Social Cognition unit first, as attitudes are a specific type of evaluative schema.
Attitudes are evaluations of people, objects, or ideas that serve psychological functions (organising knowledge, protecting self-esteem, expressing values). They can be measured explicitly (self-report) or implicitly (reaction-time tasks), and the relationship between attitudes and behaviour is more complicated than common sense suggests. Cognitive dissonance theory shows that behaviour can change attitudes just as much as attitudes change behaviour.
Attitude
An evaluation of a person, object, or idea, ranging from positive to negative. Attitudes have three components: cognitive (beliefs), affective (feelings), and behavioural (action tendencies). Think of it as your overall thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgement about something, built from what you know, feel, and are inclined to do.
Explicit attitude measures
Self-report scales and surveys where people directly state their attitudes (e.g. Likert scales, feeling thermometers). In simple terms, you are asked what you think and you tell the researcher.
Implicit attitude measures
Indirect assessments that capture attitudes people may be unwilling or unable to report, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures the speed of associations between concepts. Think of it as measuring what your brain does automatically, before you have time to edit your response.
Belief in a Just World (BJW)
The attitude that the world is fundamentally fair: good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. In simple terms, it is the belief that people get what they deserve.
Cognitive dissonance
The uncomfortable psychological tension that arises when a person holds two inconsistent cognitions, or when their behaviour conflicts with their attitudes. People are motivated to reduce this dissonance, often by changing their attitude to align with their behaviour. Think of it as the mental discomfort of saying one thing and doing another.
Stereotype
A generalised belief about the characteristics of members of a particular social group. Stereotypes are the cognitive component of prejudice.
Prejudice
A negative (or sometimes positive) attitude toward a person based solely on their membership in a particular social group. Prejudice is the affective component, the feeling directed at group members.
Discrimination
Unequal treatment of individuals based on their group membership. Discrimination is the behavioural component: prejudice put into action.
Privilege
Unearned advantages enjoyed by members of a dominant social group, often invisible to those who hold it. In the attitude literature, privilege connects to how dominant-group members may hold attitudes (including implicit ones) that sustain systemic inequality without conscious intent.
Social psychologists study attitudes because they are a bridge between cognition and behaviour. Attitudes organise our experience, guide our decisions, and express who we are.
Functions of attitudes
Knowledge function – attitudes help us organise and simplify the complex social world. Having an attitude about something means you do not need to evaluate it from scratch every time you encounter it.
Ego-defensive function – attitudes protect self-esteem. Holding certain views can shield a person from uncomfortable truths about themselves.
Value-expressive function – attitudes let people communicate their core values and identities. Wearing a campaign badge is an attitude expression.
Utilitarian (instrumental) function – attitudes help people maximise rewards and minimise punishments. You develop favourable attitudes toward things that benefit you.
How attitudes inform social cognition
Attitudes act as schemas. Once formed, an attitude biases the processing of new information: people attend more to attitude-consistent information, interpret ambiguous information in attitude-consistent ways, and remember attitude-consistent material better. This is why attitudes, once established, can be remarkably persistent.
Explicit measures
Self-report questionnaires: Likert scales ("rate your agreement from 1 to 7"), semantic differentials, feeling thermometers.
Strengths: easy to administer, allow direct comparison across participants, can capture nuanced positions.
Limitations: susceptible to social desirability bias (people report what they think they should feel, not what they do feel), demand characteristics (participants guess the study's purpose and adjust responses), and may miss attitudes the person is not consciously aware of.
Implicit measures
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures the speed with which people pair target concepts (e.g. racial groups) with evaluative attributes (e.g. "good" vs. "bad"). Faster pairings suggest stronger implicit associations.
Other implicit measures include priming tasks and physiological indicators (skin conductance, facial EMG).
Strengths: can capture attitudes people are unwilling or unable to report, less affected by social desirability bias, may predict spontaneous behaviour better than explicit measures in sensitive domains.
Limitations: test-retest reliability of the IAT has been questioned, implicit measures are context-sensitive (the score can shift with recent exposure), and what they measure is debated (some argue they capture cultural knowledge rather than personal attitudes).
From a methods perspective, the exam expects you to identify the relative strengths and limitations of each approach for research purposes. A well-designed study often uses both, since they can capture different aspects of the same attitude.
Belief in a Just World is the conviction that the world is a fair place where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
BJW is associated with other attitudes, including political conservatism, opposition to social welfare programmes, and victim-blaming. If you believe the world is fair, then people who suffer must have done something to bring it on themselves.
BJW serves a psychological function: it provides a sense of control and predictability. If the world is just, then you can protect yourself by being a good person. Without BJW, the world feels random and threatening.
People who score high on BJW are more likely to derogate victims of misfortune ("they must have done something to deserve it") and less likely to support systemic explanations for inequality.
Real-world application: BJW helps explain why people sometimes blame victims of crime, poverty, or illness. Understanding this bias is relevant to public policy debates about welfare, criminal justice, and healthcare.
Do attitudes predict behaviour?
Common sense says yes: if you like something, you approach it; if you dislike it, you avoid it. Social psychology's answer is more nuanced.
LaPiere's study (1934)
LaPiere travelled across the United States with a Chinese couple, visiting 251 hotels and restaurants. They were refused service only once.
Six months later, LaPiere wrote to each establishment asking if they would serve Chinese guests. Over 90% said they would not.
The study demonstrated a dramatic gap between stated attitudes (prejudice expressed in writing) and actual behaviour (serving the couple in person), and it launched decades of research into when and why attitudes do or do not predict behaviour.
Factors that improve attitude–behaviour consistency
Attitude strength: strong, personally important attitudes predict behaviour better than weak ones.
Attitude accessibility: attitudes that come to mind quickly are more likely to guide behaviour.
Specificity match: attitudes predict behaviour best when both are measured at the same level of specificity (a general attitude toward "exercise" weakly predicts whether you will go for a run tomorrow; an attitude toward "running on Tuesday mornings" predicts it much better).
Situational pressures: strong situational forces (social norms, authority, time pressure) can override attitudes. The weaker the situational press, the more attitudes matter.
Self-awareness: when people are made self-aware (e.g. standing in front of a mirror), they are more likely to act consistently with their stated attitudes.
Cognitive dissonance theory
Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory (1957) introduced a counterintuitive insight: behaviour can change attitudes, not just the other way around.
Dissonance arises when a person holds two inconsistent cognitions, or when their behaviour contradicts their attitude. This inconsistency creates psychological discomfort.
To reduce dissonance, people often change the attitude to match the behaviour, because the behaviour has already occurred and cannot be undone.
Classic demonstration: Festinger and Carlsmith (1959). Participants performed a boring task. Those paid $1 to tell the next participant the task was fun (insufficient justification) later rated the task as more enjoyable than those paid $20. The $1 group had no adequate external justification for lying, so they reduced dissonance by changing their attitude toward the task.
Dissonance theory reveals that the attitude–behaviour relationship is bidirectional: attitudes shape behaviour, and behaviour shapes attitudes.
The attitude framework maps directly onto intergroup relations.
Stereotypes as cognitive attitudes – generalised beliefs about group members function as schemas. They shape what we notice, remember, and expect from individuals who belong to a stereotyped group.
Prejudice as affective attitudes – negative feelings toward a group or its members. Prejudice can be explicit (openly expressed) or implicit (operating outside conscious awareness, measurable via the IAT).
Discrimination as behavioural expression – when prejudiced attitudes translate into unequal treatment: hiring decisions, microaggressions, exclusion from opportunities.
Privilege – the attitude literature highlights that dominant-group members often hold implicit attitudes that sustain inequality without conscious effort. Privilege is the structural counterpart: unearned advantages that accrue to members of dominant groups and are often invisible to those who hold them.
The three-component model (cognitive, affective, behavioural) provides a clean framework for analysing how intergroup attitudes form, persist, and manifest in real-world outcomes.
Students often assume that attitudes always predict behaviour. They do not. The LaPiere study and decades of subsequent research show that the link is conditional, depending on attitude strength, specificity, situational pressure, and other moderators.
Students sometimes think cognitive dissonance only works when people are forced to do something against their will. The theory is most powerful precisely when the person freely chooses to act inconsistently with their attitude (the less external justification, the more dissonance, the more attitude change).
Students confuse stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, using the terms interchangeably. They are distinct: stereotypes are beliefs (cognitive), prejudice is feeling (affective), and discrimination is action (behavioural). The exam will expect you to distinguish them.
Students may assume implicit attitudes are "truer" than explicit ones. Implicit and explicit measures capture different facets of the same attitude system. Neither is inherently more valid; they predict different types of behaviour.
⚠️ Know the LaPiere study in detail: what he did, what he found, and what it tells us about the attitude–behaviour gap.
⚠️ Cognitive dissonance, especially the Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) $1/$20 experiment, is a classic exam question. Be ready to explain the mechanism (insufficient justification leads to greater attitude change).
⚠️ Be prepared to compare explicit and implicit measures, naming at least one strength and one limitation of each.
⚠️ BJW is likely to appear in a scenario-based question about victim-blaming or attitudes toward inequality.
⚠️ The stereotype–prejudice–discrimination distinction maps onto the cognitive–affective–behavioural components of attitudes. Expect a question that tests whether you can sort examples into the right category.
True or False: The Implicit Association Test measures attitudes by asking participants to directly rate their feelings toward a group.
Answer: False. The IAT measures reaction times to pairings of concepts and evaluative attributes, capturing implicit associations rather than direct self-report.
Fill in the blank: In Festinger and Carlsmith's experiment, participants paid $________ showed the greatest attitude change toward the boring task.
Answer: $1 (the insufficient justification condition).
True or False: Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the more external justification a person has for counter-attitudinal behaviour, the more their attitude will change.
Answer: False. Less external justification produces more dissonance and therefore more attitude change.
Fill in the blank: Stereotypes are to ________ as prejudice is to ________ as discrimination is to ________.
Answer: Cognitive; affective; behavioural.
True or False: LaPiere's study showed that hotel owners' stated attitudes toward Chinese guests accurately predicted their behaviour when a Chinese couple arrived.
Answer: False. The stated attitudes (refusal) did not predict the actual behaviour (service was provided in nearly all cases).
Q: Describe two functions that attitudes serve for individuals. Give an example of each.
A: (1) The knowledge function: attitudes simplify a complex world by providing ready-made evaluations. Example: your attitude toward a political party means you do not need to evaluate every policy from scratch. (2) The ego-defensive function: attitudes can protect self-esteem. Example: a person who is anxious about their academic ability may adopt a dismissive attitude toward a subject they find difficult, protecting themselves from the threat of failure.
Q: A researcher wants to study racial attitudes. Explain one advantage and one disadvantage of using the IAT instead of a self-report survey.
A: Advantage: the IAT can capture implicit associations that participants may be unwilling or unable to report, reducing social desirability bias. Disadvantage: the IAT's test-retest reliability has been questioned, and it may reflect cultural knowledge (exposure to stereotypes) rather than personal endorsement of those stereotypes.
Q: Using cognitive dissonance theory, explain why a person who volunteers for a charity they initially had no interest in might develop a positive attitude toward that charity.
A: The person freely chose to volunteer (behaviour) despite having no strong positive attitude toward the charity (attitude). This inconsistency creates cognitive dissonance. Because the behaviour cannot be undone, the person resolves the dissonance by shifting their attitude to be more favourable toward the charity. The less external justification for volunteering (e.g. no payment, no social pressure), the stronger this attitude shift will be.
Q: How does Belief in a Just World contribute to victim-blaming? Give an example.
A: BJW holds that people get what they deserve. When confronted with an innocent victim (e.g. someone who is assaulted), the BJW-holder faces a threat to their belief in a fair world. Rather than abandoning the belief, they may derogate the victim ("they should have been more careful" or "they must have provoked it"), thereby preserving the sense that the world is just.
Q: Explain the difference between stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination using the three-component model of attitudes.
A: Stereotypes are the cognitive component: generalised beliefs about a group (e.g. "Group X is lazy"). Prejudice is the affective component: negative feelings toward a group or its members (e.g. disliking members of Group X). Discrimination is the behavioural component: unequal treatment based on group membership (e.g. refusing to hire a member of Group X). All three can operate independently: a person may hold a stereotype without feeling prejudice, or feel prejudice without acting on it.
Attitudes connect backward to the Social Cognition unit: schemas, accessibility, and processing routes all apply to how attitudes are formed and maintained. Cognitive dissonance connects forward to the Self unit, since dissonance reduction is partly about maintaining a coherent self-concept. The stereotype–prejudice–discrimination framework connects to the Group Behaviour unit, particularly in-group bias, social identity theory, and the contact hypothesis for reducing intergroup hostility.
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