Attitude change
It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node.
These three processes represent the different levels of attitude change in response to accepting influence.
[4] Compliance refers to a change in behavior based on consequences, such as an individual's hopes to gain rewards or avoid punishment from another group or person.
Experiments led by Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College asked groups of students to participate in a "vision test".
[6] Identification explains one's change of beliefs and affect in order to be similar to someone one admires or likes.
Identification also reflects a need to establish or maintain a meaningful, self-defining connection with another person or group, often by taking on their role or forming a reciprocal relationship.
[7] Emotion plays a major role in persuasion, social influence, and attitude change.
Attitude change based on emotions can be seen vividly in serial killers who are faced with major stress.
[9] There is considerable empirical support for the idea that emotions in the form of fear arousal,[10][11] empathy,[12] or a positive mood[13] can enhance attitude change under certain conditions.
[14] Important factors that influence the impact of emotional appeals include self-efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features.
A new attitude (e.g. to time-keeping or absenteeism or quality) may challenge existing beliefs or norms so creating a feeling of psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance.
Research suggests that predicting emotions is an important component of decision making, in addition to the cognitive processes.
Since we cannot see into the brain, various models and measurement tools have been constructed to obtain emotion and attitude information.
By focusing on specific tasks or processing methods, it may overlook other factors, such as individual differences in how emotions influence memory encoding or attention.
Cognitive dissonance, a theory originally developed by Festinger (1957), is the idea that people experience a sense of guilt or uneasiness when two linked cognitions are inconsistent, such as when there are two conflicting attitudes about a topic, or inconsistencies between one's attitude and behavior on a certain topic.
[30] These negative consequences may be threats to the consistency, stability, predictability, competence, moral goodness of the self-concept,[31] or violation of general self-integrity.
When multiple routes are available, it has been found that people prefer to reduce dissonance by directly altering their attitudes and behaviors rather than through self-affirmation.
[33] People who have high levels of self-esteem, who are postulated to possess abilities to reduce dissonance by focusing on positive aspects of the self, have also been found to prefer modifying cognitions, such as attitudes and beliefs, over self-affirmation.
Thus, attitude change is achieved when individuals experience feelings of uneasiness or guilt due to cognitive dissonance, and actively reduce the dissonance through changing their attitude, beliefs, or behavior relating in order to achieve consistency with the inconsistent cognitions.
Carl Hovland and his band of persuasion researchers learned a great deal during World War 2 and later at Yale about the process of attitude change.
[36] The stability of people's past attitudes can be influenced if they hold beliefs that are inconsistent with their own behaviors.
More importantly, this process of resolving people's cognitive conflicts that emerges cuts across both self-perception and dissonance even when the associated effect may only be strong in changing prior attitudes Human judgment is comparative in nature.
More recent work in the area of persuasion has further explored this "comparative processing" from the perspective of focusing on comparing between different sets of information on one single issue or object instead of simply making comparisons among different issues or objects.
These findings above have wide range of applications in social marketing, political communication, and health promotion.
