Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Prologue -- Chapter 1 What is an attitude and why is it important? -- What is an attitude? -- Why do people have attitudes? -- Organisation of knowledge, and regulating approach and avoidance -- Higher psychological needs -- Inter-individual differences and multiple functions -- Research applying attitude functions -- Why study attitudes? -- Overview of the book -- Chapter summary -- Exercises -- Further reading -- PART I GATEWAYS TO OUR ATTITUDES -- Chapter 2 Asking for attitudes: not that simple after all -- The concept of measurement

Human beings have a unique ability to create elaborate predispositions and evaluations based on their social experiences. The concept of attitudes is central to understanding how experience gives rise to these predispositions, and psychologists have spent the best part of the past 100 years trying to understand the intricacies of this process. Yet, despite decades of research, we still do not fully understand how attitudes are created, maintained and changed. The main objective of this book is to review and integrate some of the most recent, cutting-edge developments in research on attitudes and attitude change, presenting the work of eminent scholars in this field. Chapters in this book deal with such intriguing questions as: What role do associative processes play in the formation of attitudes? How do attitudes function as global and local action guides? What is the function of implicit evaluations, and vicarious experiences in producing attitude change? Are implicit associations a useful way to measure attitudes? What role does affect play in attitude formation and change? What role do social interaction processes play in persuasion, and how does persuasion work in real-life settings? The book is essential reading for students and researchers in social psychology, as well as practitioners in every field where understanding and changing attitudes is important, such as clinical, counseling, organizational, marketing, forensic, and developmental psychology.

This paper discusses the semantics of so-called de re propositional attitudes. According to the standard Kaplanian analysis, the semantics of such dicta contains existential quantifica­tion over functions that map the attitude holder and the object of their de re attitude to an individual concept by which the attitude holder identifies the object. This existential quantifi­cation has a wider scope than the universal quantification over possible worlds that is general­ly associated with the semantics of attitude dicta. We explore examples of disjunctive de re attitudes and show that these dicta have truth conditions that cannot be grasped by the stand­ard analysis. To account for them, we propose a revision of the theory of concept generators and show how the revised theory makes correct predictions.

In recent years, political discourse and election results appear to be more polarized in western countries but is this associated with increasing attitude polarization of their general public? To answer this question, many different polarization measures have been proposed in the literature but no systematic empirical comparison exists. In an exploratory analysis of 4155 attitude distributions on 11-point scales from the European Social Survey, we find that most polarization measures for single attitude distributions correlate strongly with the average attitude discrepancy between randomly selected pairs. We propose this as a catch-all measure for polarization because it can be decomposed into components related to different groups. By analyzing attitude distributions of the left–right political self-placements and several other topics, we find that distributions are typically not unimodal or bimodal, but show more so a structure with up to five modes. We exploit this structure by fitting a model with five latent groups of moderates, extremists, and centrists. Finally, we use the decomposition of polarization with respect to these groups to analyze polarization and its different aspects across topics, countries, and time establishing an overview and new perspectives on single attitude polarization in Europe.

With a background in sociolinguistics, this paper presents the theoretical, methodological and epistemological issues the author was forced to negotiate in conducting the apparently simple task of investigating a few dozen people's attitudes towards the English influence on their own language. The paper discusses the fundamental epistemological shortcomings of different approaches to attitude research. Three different orders of analysis are attempted and reflected upon, a standardized quantitative analysis, a discourse analysis and a deconstructive, nonessentialist analysis. It is the author's firm believe that this critical examination of methods is on the one hand essential for academic approaches to attitude research, and on the other essential in informing the public - you and me - about the mechanisms of opinion polls which underlies so much modern political work. In this respect, the papers "failure" to set up a new and improved approach to attitude research, and its content to point out the shortcomings of the current approaches, may not be a failure as much as a conscious plea to do away with the notion of a objective or neutral investigation of opinions.

With a background in sociolinguistics, this paper presents the theoretical, methodological and epistemological issues the author was forced to negotiate in conducting the apparently simple task of investigating a few dozen people's attitudes towards the English influence on their own language. The paper discusses the fundamental epistemological shortcomings of different approaches to attitude research. Three different orders of analysis are attempted and reflected upon, a standardized quantitative analysis, a discourse analysis and a deconstructive, nonessentialist analysis. It is the author's firm believe that this critical examination of methods is on the one hand essential for academic approaches to attitude research, and on the other essential in informing the public - you and me - about the mechanisms of opinion polls which underlies so much modern political work. In this respect, the papers "failure" to set up a new and improved approach to attitude research, and its content to point out the shortcomings of the current approaches, may not be a failure as much as a conscious plea to do away with the notion of a objective or neutral investigation of opinions.