activation
A number of studies have provided evidence supporting the model of automatic attitude activation and the moderating role of attitude accessibility in automatic attitude activation. In a study concerning attitudes towards capital punishment, D. A. Houston and Fazio (1989) found that the extent to which subjects’ attitudes biased their judgements of attitude relevant information was moderated by the accessibility of those attitudes. Consistent with the model, more accessible attitudes were more likely to be activated to ‘colour’ the way the information was perceived.
To demonstrate that attitude activation in the presence of an attitude object may occur automatically, that is without any conscious, intentional cognitive processing, Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell and Kardes (1986) selected individuals who manifested either fast or slow response times in a preliminary task that assessed their attitudes towards various objects (e.g. music). In a subsequent task, these attitude
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objects were briefly presented to subjects just before they made evaluative judgements (positive/negative) about unrelated adjectives (e.g. appealing). Response latencies for these latter judgements served as the dependent measure. Priming subjects with objects towards which their attitudes matched the evaluative valence of the target adjective facilitated response times with respect to the latter judgements, but only for subjects who were assumed to have a strong object-evaluation association (i.e. subjects who had responded fast in the preliminary task). Moreover, because this priming effect was observed at very short prime-target intervals (0.3 seconds) and not at longer intervals (1 second), Fazio and his colleagues concluded that the activation of these subjects’ attitudes had occurred automatically.
In a more recent experiment, Sanbonmatsu and Fazio (1986) used brand names as primes. As in the previous research, brands towards which subjects possessed positive attitudes facilitated their responding to positive evaluative adjectives. That is, subjects were able to indicate the connotation of a positive evaluative adjective relatively quickly when such an adjective was preceded by a positively valued brand name. Likewise, negatively valued brand names facilitated subjects’ responding to adjectives that were negative in connotation. Again, this pattern was observed only for attitudes involving strong object-evaluation associations, as indicated by latency of response to a preliminary direct attitudinal inquiry. Only brand names for which subjects were able to respond relatively quickly were able to facilitate responses in the adjective connotation task.
However, Bargh, Chaiken, Govender and Pratto (1992; see also Chaiken and, 1993) have questioned whether idiosyncratic differences in the strength of the object- evaluation association (rather than normative differences constant across individuals) is
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the principal determinant of this automaticity effect. Instead, these investigators argue that evaluations existent in memory become automatically active on the mere presentation of the object irrespective of individuals’ evaluation latencies. Thus, the priming effects observed in previous studies (Fazio et al., 1986; Sanbonmatsu and Fazio, 1986) should be generalisable across a very wide range of attitude objects (i.e. objects for which most people hold an evaluation). In addition, Bargh et al. (1992) argue that the effects observed in these studies might be attributed to the activation of attitude primes directly prior to the adjective connotation task (necessitated by the collection of response latency data). To substantiate this argument, they conducted an experiment (Chaiken and Bargh, 1993) in which half the subjects reported their attitudes immediately before the priming phase, while the other half reported their attitudes two days before the priming task. Under no delay, the automaticity effect was reliable, as was its moderation by response latency. In the delay condition, by contrast, the automaticity effect was reliable, but its moderation by response latency was not.
Fazio (1993) responded to these criticisms by presenting the results of an experiment (utilising colour images, rather than words, as primes) involving a 3 month delay between the assessment of evaluation latencies and the connotation task (i.e. the assessment of automatic activation). The findings of this experiment were consistent with those of Fazio et al. (1986), as attitudinally congruent facilitation during the adjective connotation task was moderated significantly by the response latency variable. The faster subjects had indicated their attitudes during the first session, the greater the evidence of automatic attitude activation when that object was used as a prime three months later.
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Several studies have established the moderating role of attitude accessibility on attitude-behaviour consistency. Fazio et al. (1982, experiment 4) manipulated the accessibility of subjects’ attitudes towards a series o f puzzle types by having them express their attitudes either once or three times. The experiment showed that correlations between attitudes towards the puzzles and behaviour in a free play situation were higher for the high accessibility (repeated attitude expression) group than for the low accessibility group.
In a subsequent study, Fazio, Powell and Williams (1989) examined the relationship between respondents’ attitude towards a number of consumer products and their actual product selection behaviour. At the conclusion of an experimental session, in which subjects’ attitudes and attitude accessibility regarding 10 consumer products had been assessed, subjects were allowed to select 5 of these 10 products to take as a gift for having participated in the study. Both within-subject and between- subject analyses showed that the more accessible subjects’ attitudes were the more consistent their selection behaviour was with those attitudes.
In another study concerning the 1984 presidential election in the United States, Fazio and Williams (1986) found that the individuals’ global attitudes towards the candidates biased their perception of the candidates’ performance during pre-election debates. That is, people with positive attitudes towards a candidate perceived his performance in the debates as more positive. It was also found that correlations between attitude measures and actual voting behaviour were higher for individuals whose attitudes were highly accessible than for individuals whose attitudes were difficult to access. Thus, attitude accessibility was found to moderate both the attitude- perception and the attitude-behaviour relationships.
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Chapter 4 —
One question that arises when studying the effects of attitude accessibihty on automatic attitude activation and on attitude-behaviour consistency is what makes some attitudes more accessible than others, in other words, what determines the accessibility of an attitude and why attitude accessibility differs across individuals and attitude objects. It is argued in this thesis that involvement is one factor responsible for variations in the accessibility of attitudes and, more specifically, that attitude accessibility is a positive function of involvement. Before suggesting possible ways in which involvement might influence attitude accessibility, the concept of attitude strength is introduced and the interrelationships among its dimensions are discussed.