Attitudes and attribution (SACE Stage 2 Psychology)

What this dot point is asking

You need to explain how attitudes are structured and how they change, and to describe attribution processes and the common biases that affect them.

What attitudes are

An attitude is a relatively stable, learned evaluation that disposes a person to respond favourably or unfavourably to something. The tri-component (ABC) model describes three parts:

• Affective - feelings and emotions ("I feel uneasy about heights").
• Behavioural - the way we act or intend to act ("I avoid tall buildings").
• Cognitive - beliefs and thoughts ("heights are dangerous").

Attitudes do not always predict behaviour: situational pressures, habits and the strength and specificity of the attitude all influence whether it shows up in action.

How attitudes change

• Persuasion. The likelihood of attitude change depends on the source (credibility, attractiveness), the message (clear, balanced, emotional appeal), and the audience.
• Cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger argued that holding two inconsistent thoughts, or acting against an attitude, produces uncomfortable tension (dissonance). People reduce it by changing the attitude, changing the behaviour, or adding new justifications.

Attribution: explaining behaviour

Attribution is the process of assigning a cause to behaviour. We typically choose between:

• Internal (dispositional) attributions - the cause is something about the person (ability, personality, effort).
• External (situational) attributions - the cause is something about the situation (luck, task difficulty, social pressure).

Harold Kelley's covariation model says we judge the cause using consistency, distinctiveness and consensus information.

Common attribution errors

• Fundamental attribution error. We tend to over-explain other people's behaviour with internal causes and under-weight the situation.
• Self-serving bias. We attribute our own successes to internal causes (ability) and our failures to external causes (bad luck), protecting self-esteem.
• Actor-observer bias. We explain our own behaviour situationally but others' behaviour dispositionally.

Why this matters

Attitudes and attributions underpin prejudice, persuasion and conflict. Understanding them helps explain why people resist evidence, misjudge others' motives, and can be persuaded or manipulated.

Persuasion can be analysed with the elaboration likelihood model, which distinguishes a central route (the audience thinks carefully about strong arguments, producing lasting change) from a peripheral route (the audience responds to surface cues such as an attractive or expert-seeming source, producing weaker, shorter-lived change). This explains why the same message persuades different audiences in different ways and why durable attitude change usually requires genuine engagement with the argument rather than just an appealing presenter.

Measuring attitudes and the attitude-behaviour gap

Attitudes are usually measured with self-report scales such as Likert items (agree to disagree ratings). These are practical but vulnerable to social desirability bias, where people report the attitude they think is acceptable rather than the one they hold. This is one reason the link between stated attitudes and actual behaviour can be weak. The theory of planned behaviour improves prediction by adding the person's perceived social pressure (subjective norms) and their sense of control over the behaviour to the attitude itself; behaviour is best predicted when all three line up. For SACE, the key evaluative point is that attitudes are real influences on behaviour but they operate alongside norms, control and the situation rather than determining behaviour on their own.