Search Results

Political deliberation involves both internal reflection and public discussion. The former might be far more important than implied by deliberative democrats' heavy emphasis the discursive component. Analysis of the deliberations of a citizen's jury on an Australian environmental issue shows jurors' attitudes changing more in response to the ‘informational’ phase of the jury proceedings involving a large degree of ‘deliberation within’ than during the formal ‘discussion’ phase. Various ways can be imagined for evoking internal reflection of that sort, even in mass political settings.

This chapter examines how attitudes change. The first assumption of the cognitive fix is that attitudes must change in order to change behavior. Leopold’s attitude changed from wolf-hater to wolf-lover. Bennington students’ attitudes became more liberal and these changes persisted for five decades. Public attitudes toward wolves and the environment have become more positive as older generations are replaced by new. But these changes all took time. Less well-developed attitudes can sometimes change quickly when linked to stronger, more central attitudes. This is where the media can play a role through framing. That attitudes can and do change does not necessarily mean we can change them whenever we choose.

Three stages in the life of an artifact are (a) ignorance of its existence, (b) coping with the artifact, and (c) exploiting it for what it can tell us about human behavior. This chapter focuses on the subject's suspicions of the experimenter's intent, with special emphasis on strategies for recognizing, coping with, and exploiting this source of artifact.

This chapter presents the idea of three fixes for environmental problems and shows how attitudes are fundamental to each. Attitudes are most important for the cognitive fix that requires information to both change attitudes and make these new attitudes lead to pro-environmental behaviors. Technological fixes that change the environment directly and structural fixes that change the situation influencing human behavior must also be consistent with attitudes in order to be implemented. The scientific study of attitudes is hampered by their invisibility. To better understand them it is useful to think of attitudes like rocks in a river that we cannot see, but, rather, we must infer from the patterns in the water that runs over them. Aldo Leopold, the wildlife ecologist and environmentalist, is introduced as a case study to understand environmental attitudes, how they change, and what they have to do with behavior.

This chapter discusses research designs in which subjects are measured on the dependent variable before and after the treatment has been implemented, and the concern is that pretest measurement may have sensitized the subjects so that they respond differently to the treatment than had they not been pretested.

This chapter asks whether the experience of the American conflict altered British attitudes to war and to empire. In many senses the answer must be no, continuity is often the dominant impression. But in certain respects attitudes did change. The American war saw the first sustained and large-scale public criticism of the use of military force as an instrument of policy. While the criticism was directed, for the most part, at the justice and wisdom of fighting fellow subjects, rather than a genuine expression of hostility to war as such, it prepared the ground for the more clearly anti-war campaigns in the struggle against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Attitudes to empire also underwent change. Opposition to the possession of overseas territories, while gaining converts in intellectual circles, remained very much a minority view, but the loss of America accentuated a process of change in the nature of the empire, and with this change came an important shift in public perceptions.

During a long deliberative process, opinion stability is unlikely. This chapter documents the path taken by assembly members' views on electoral systems. It ascertains when preferences emerged, whether they moved afterwards, how volatile they were, and whether the movement was steered by comprehensible factors. The chapter shows that the opinions of ordinary citizens directly involved in an extensive exercise of public decision-making do not evolve chaotically over time. Assembly members' views and preferences about electoral systems developed gradually as they were acquiring information about the various options. These attitudes then remained quite stable over the subsequent months. Very little aggregate or individual volatility characterized the consultation and deliberation phases.

This chapter analyzes the exceptional cases-the people who appear to contradict the predictions of generational theory with respect to their discourses and attitudes about gay marriage. Young conservatives who oppose gay marriage and old liberals who have always supported gay rights are parts of resistant subcultures that insulated them from generational change. Similarly, older liberals who changed their attitudes about gay marriage illuminate the process by which generational change can cause period effects. It is argued that these exceptions are compatible with generational theory because of the difference between the cohort and the generation.

The contact hypothesis predicts that racial prejudice diminishes when whites and non-whites interact in a setting that fosters cooperation among people of equal status. This hypothesis has seldom, if ever, been tested using randomized experimentation outside the laboratory. This chapter reports the results of a randomized field experiment in which white students were randomly assigned to Outward Bound two- and three-week wilderness courses. In the control group, all the students in each course were non-Hispanic whites. In the treatment group, most of the students were non-Hispanic whites, but at least three of the participants were African-Americans. One month after completing the course, the white participants were interviewed by telephone. As expected, the group that experienced a racially heterogeneous environment expressed greater levels of tolerance than the control group. Although these findings require replication, the research design provides a template for future field-experiments examining the validity of the contact hypothesis.

Chapter 8 demonstrates that support for marriage equality is the fastest liberalizing attitude in the history of American public opinion. Abortion rights and gay rights divide the American public along similar lines (by region, religiosity, and party affiliation), but gay rights has undergone a remarkable transformation, while attitudes toward abortion rights are relatively static. One reason for the difference is that gay people have come out of the closet, while abortion histories remain closeted. Chapter 8 also shows that support for marriage equality seems to have made Americans more appreciative of all kinds of queer rights, including transgender rights. Marriage equality reduced the stigmas faced by all queer people and paved the way for more appreciation of all kinds of gay rights, exactly as the proponents of marriage equality said that it would.

This chapter begins by describing the dramatic increase in direct contact of the American public with LGBTQ people documented using polling data. Trends in depictions of LGBTQ people on television and film are outlined, which mirror the expansion of direct contact with LGBTQs. These two factors---direct contact and meditated contact---are processed in similar ways psychologically according to affective liberalization. Both are predicted to be more effective at attitude change among younger people. The theory is then empirically tested using four different expansive cross-time public opinion datasets. All four analyses of the data-sets come to same conclusion, contact with LGBTQs (mediated and interpersonal) explains all the distinctive features of attitude change---its large magnitude, its timing, its broadness across specific gay rights issues, and its concentration among the millennial generation.

This chapter examines the development of rock ‘n’ roll music in China and its links with the emergent youth culture. It focuses on how young rebels use their own rock music as a means of reflecting their changing attitudes, behaviour, and “mood of living.” It examines Tian Zuangzhuang 's Rock Kids, Zhang Yuan 's Beijing Bastards, and Jiang Wen 's In the Heat of the Sun.

This chapter focuses on the changing attitudes to those who were deemed to live in the more important England, and the ethnological theories that established their ancient title to it. English natives such as these were discovered in the poorer and more marginal places. In spite of the profound cultural conservatism, not to say condescension, the return of the native did have positive effects. Certain kinds of poor people came to be valued and even, in a way, honored.

Chapter 1 outlines a new theory of how seemingly unrelated in-group identity priming can effectively develop feelings of interpersonal closeness and open minds to attitudinal change: the Theory of Dissonant Identity Priming. It reviews relevant literature on social identity theory and identity formation as well as the effects identity can have on political attitudes and behavior, outlining theories of attitude change and the limits to which scholars expect attitude change to happen, with a particular focus on the power of priming. Finally, Chapter 1 also includes an overview of the experiments conducted to test TDIP, conducted between 2011 and 2014, with the cooperation of various organizations and citizen groups and in a variety of geographic contexts around the United States.

While it is clear that implicit attitudes are malleable, there is much to learn about the most effective techniques for changing them. This chapter examines three general approaches that increasingly appear to be well supported in both lab-based and field studies. The chapter considers the importance of rote practice, pre-commitment, and context regulation. Each represents a different element of adopting the “habit stance,” a way of cultivating more ethical implicit attitudes—and hence better spontaneous decisions and actions—by treating them as if they were habits. The chapter concludes by considering two kinds of objections. The first is empirical, focusing on the broadness and durability of implicit attitude change interventions. The second is not empirical. It is about the nature of praise, in particular whether the reshaping of one’s attitudes and behavior in the ways the chapter describes counts as a genuine form of ethical self-improvement.

This chapter presents an overview of theories and research on the role of music in television advertising and other persuasive media. Using Petty and Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model as a theoretical framework for attitudinal change, the chapter examines the multiple roles music may play in advertising, either as a background element or as an integrated element in an audiovisual medium. Music may increase or decrease motivation and ability to elaborate on a persuasive message, thereby guiding a person to use a central or peripheral route to processing the content of the advertisement. Music may also provide information (e.g., affect-as-information) in the persuasive message that is processed within either route. To delineate these effects, music as a means to attract attention, facilitate recall, and construct meanings is also examined. Findings of these strands of research are applied to audio branding, understanding musical fit, enhancing implicit learning, and the creation of virtual atmospheres on the Internet.

This chapter is a review of the relevant literature on effecting changes in attitudes and behaviors toward people with disabilities. It begins with a discussion of the goals of the book and the activities in the book. There is discussion of the relationship between attitudes and behaviors, and whether a change in one is followed by a change in the other. The core research about the bases of attitudes toward disability and attitude change is reviewed. The move in the past few decades from attention to implicit bias to focus on explicit bias is highlighted. The rationale for not using simulation exercises is provided, as well as the social underpinnings of the activities.