Changing prejudiced attitudes by thinking about persuasive messages: implications for resistance

Abstract

Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription Changing Prejudiced Attitudes by Thinking About Persuasive Messages: Implications for ResistanceMiguel A. M. Cárdaba Villanueva Centro UniversitarioPablo Briñol, Javier Horcajo Universidad Autónoma de MadridRichard E. Petty This research showed that changing attitudes toward stigmatized groups can be affected by both simple processes that require little thinking but also by traditional elaborative forms of persuasion that require high thinking processes. Importantly, even when the obtained attitude change was equivalent for situations in which there was high and low message elaboration, the changes produced in high thinking conditions were found to be more resistant to further attacks than equivalent changes produced by less thoughtful mechanisms. Not only were those attitudes more resistant as measured objectively (study 1) but participants also perceived their attitudes to be subjectively more resistant (study 2). Ohio State University3 Attitudes refer to general evaluations people have regarding other people, places, objects, and issues (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993;Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Groups of people (e.g., the French, Asian, women) can be understood as attitude objects that can influence thoughts and actions. As is the case with any other attitude object, one's overall evaluation of the group (e.g., prejudice) can influence behavior toward members of that group (e.g., discrimination; e.g., see Dovidio, 2001). The current research examines the importance of considering the basic process by which a reduction in prejudice toward stigmatized groups occurs. In particular, we examine the implications of reducing prejudice through processes that require extensive or little amounts of thinking. Prejudice Reduction: Low Thinking ProcessesBased on the idea that contemporary prejudice is quite subtle (e.g., it can be held and expressed in unconscious ways; Devine, 1989;Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004;Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995), some scholars have considered that the best strategies for fighting it must also be subtle. Thus, recommended techniques aimed at reducing prejudice are often based on processes that imply little thinking. For example, the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954), one of the most well known strategies for reducing intergroup conflict, is proposed to rely on processes requiring little information processing, such as mere exposure (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) and classical conditioning (Dovidio, Gaertner & Kawakami, 2003). Indeed, two of the most primitive and effective means of changing attitudes involve mere repetition of the attitude object (mere exposure) and associating it with stimuli that already have a valence (conditioning; e.g., Kawakami, Phills, Steele & Dovidio 2007).Attitudes toward minority groups can be changed through other processes that also require r...

La advertencia del intento persuasivo en contextos publicitarios

“…Debido a su alta correlación interna (alpha de Cronbach de .82) estos cuatro ítems fueron promediados para formar un único índice de actitudes hacia el producto. Mayores puntuaciones en este índice indicaron actitudes más positivas hacia el producto (para una medida similar de las actitudes, véase Briñol, Petty, y Stavraki, 2012;Cárdaba, Briñol, Horcajo, y Petty, 2014).…”

The Effects of Elaboration on the Strength of Doping-Related Attitudes: Resistance to Change and Behavioral Intentions

“…As expected, a 2 × 2 ANOVA showed only the predicted significant main effect of the elaboration manipulation on this index: participants in the high-elaboration condition reported greater cognitive effort (M = 7.35, SD = 1.39) than participants in the low-elaboration condition (M = 6.43, SD = 1.05), F 1, 61 = 8.17, p < .01, η 2 = .12. Although this might not be a perfectly reliable measure of amount of elaboration, previous research has shown that such self-reports can be effective in discriminating participants who had engaged in relatively high versus low elaboration (Cárdaba et al, 2014;.…”

“…These second messages were briefer versions of the essays used for the first messages to avoid participants' fatigue, including only three arguments from the five arguments included in the first antilegalization or prolegalization message. In both cases, to hide the objectives of the experiment, these attacking counter-attitudinal messages (against or in favor of legalization) were presented as information published in newspapers (see Cárdaba et al, 2014).…”

Objectification of people and thoughts: An attitude change perspective

“…Second, even if two different processes result in the same extent of persuasion, the consequences of this persuasion can differ. As noted earlier, the ELM holds that the process by which an attitude is formed or changed is consequential for the strength of the attitude (i.e., whether it lasts in the long term; see Cárdaba, Briñol, Horcajo, & Petty, ). For example, in a recent study, Mello, Garcia‐Marques, Briñol, Cancela, and Petty () found that attitudes predicted behavioural intentions better for those high (vs. low) in perceived attractiveness and that this effect was more likely to be observed for participants high (vs. low) in self‐objectification.…”