On the Power and Functionality of Attitudes

Fazio, R. H. (1989). On the power and functionality attitudes: The role of attitude accessibility. In A. Pratkanis, S. J. Breckler, & A. G. Greenwald ( ~ d s . 1 , Attitude structure and function (pp.153-179) Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

O n the Power and Functionality of Attitudes: The Role of Attitude Accessibility Russell H . Fazio Indiana Univevsity Without guiding attitudes the individual is confused and baffled. Some kind of preparation is essential before he can make a satisfactory observation, pass suitable judgment, or make any but the most primitive reflex type of response. Attitudes determine for each individualwhat he will see and hear, what he will think and what he will do. To borrow a phrase ffom William James, they "engender meaning upon the world"; they draw lines about and segregate an otherwise chaotic environment; they are our methods for finding our way about in an ambiguous universe. (Allport, 1935, p. 806)

Much power has been ascribed to attitudes. As evidenced by the preceding quotation, attitudes are thought to accomplish a great deal for an individual; they are highly functional. Attitudes guide perception, information processing, and behavior. They structure one's social universe and, in so doing, ease decision-making.This presumed power of attitudes has contributed to the position af attitudes hist~ric~plly as one of the most central concepts in the field of social psychology ( I ~ c ~ u i r1985, e , 1986). Any construct that accomplishes so much for an individual obviously merits extensive theoretical and empirical inquiry. However, this ascription of power to the attitude construct has not gone unchallenged. In the waxing and waning of interest in the attitude concept that the field has exhibited over the last few decades, there have been periods marked by considerable pessimism regarding the power and utility of attitudes. Indeed, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, attitudes were viewed by some as epiphenomenal explanations for past behavior (Bem, 1972) that had little or no influence upon subsequent behavior (Wicker, 1969). This pessimism led to discussion of whether the attitude concept was necessary (Abelson, 1972) and to pleas that it be abandoned (Wicker, 1971). The essence of the thesis to be presented in this chapter is that the

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optimistic and the pessimistic views of the power of attitudes each have some validity, but they do so for different kinds of attitudes. That is, the ascription of power to the attitude construct is appropriate, and justitled by an accumulation of data, for certain kinds of attitudes. On the other hand, skepticism about the impact of other kinds of attitudes is warranted. A conceptualization of attitudes that permits one to speclfy the likelihood that a given attitude will be powerful, and that addresses the mechanisms by which this influence is exerted, is presented. In addition, recent research stemming from this conceptual model and illustrating the greater power and functionality of certain kinds of attitudes over other kinds is summarized. CONCEPTUALIZING ATTITUDES AND ATTITUDE ACCESSIBILI'IY T h e Importance o f Attitude Accessibaty If an attitude is to exert any influence upon perceptions, judgments, or behavior, it must fwst be activated from memory. Unless the attitude comes to mind when the individual encounters the attitude object, the individual may never view the object in evaluative terms. Or, if the individual does consider the object evaluatively, he or she may do so on the basis of an on-the-spotappraisal of whatever features of the attitude object happen to be salient in the immediate situation. Such an on-the-spotappraisal may not be cowistent with any previously constructed and stored attitude toward the object. It is this proposition concerning attitude accessibility that forms the core of a model of the process by which attitudes guide behavior that has been the focus of my research over the last few years, The model is presented in detail in Fazio (1986). The model and an associated conceptualization of attitudes provide the basis for a more general discussion of the power and functionality of attitudes that constitutes the focus of this chapter. According to the model, an attitude must be accessible from memory in order to have any potential to serve as the sort of powerful force alluded to earlier. It is the chronic accessibility of an attitude from memory, i.e., the likelihood that the attitude will be activated from memory upon mere exposure to the attitude object, that determines the power and functionality of an attitude. It shall be argued that attitudes that are highly accessible from memory are much more likely to guide the processing of relevant information and behavior than attitudes that are less accessible from memory. In so doing, highly accessible attitudes also have much more functional value for the individual.

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A Model o f Attitudes as Object-Evaluation Associations

Given the importance of attitude accessibility, it is essential to discuss how attitudes and their accessibility from memory are conceptualized in the present framework. An attitude is viewed as an association between a given object and a given evaluation (Fazio, Chen, McDonel, & Sherman, 1982; Fazio, 1986).As is common in the attitude literature, the term object is used in a very broad sense. Individuals may hold evaluations of a wide variety of potential attitude objects, including social issues, categories of situations, categories of people, and specific individuals, as well as physical objects. However, the term evaluation is meant broadly as well. It may range in nature from a very "hot" affect (i.e., a strong emotional response to the attitude object) to "colder" judgment of one's feelings of favorability or unfavorability toward the object (Abelson, Kinder, Peters, & Fiske, 1982; Zanna & Rempel, in press). Furthermore, this evaluative summary may be based upon emotions that the attitude object produces for the individual (as in the case of a conditioned emotional response, e.g., Zanna, Kiesler, & Pillconis, 1970), beliefs that the individual holds about the attitude object's instrumentality (e.g., Fishbein, 1963; Rosenberg, 1960), andlor previous behavioral experiences with the,attitude object (e.g., Bem, 1972; Fazio, 1987). Regardless of the precise "hot vs, cold nature of the evaluation and regardless of the basis for the evaluation, the attitude itself is viewed as an association between the attitude object and the evaluation. Although very simple, this conceptualization of attitudes is quite powerful when one considers its implications for attitude accessibility. Viewing an attitude as an association, it becomes obvious that the strength of an attitude, like any construct based on associative learning, can vary. That is, the strength of the association between the object and the evaluation can vary. This associative strength is postulated to be the major determinant of the chronic accessibility of the attitude and, hence, the likelihood that the attitude will be activated from memory upon the individual's encountering the attitude object. Empirical tests of this view of attitudes as object-evaluation associations have yielded confirming results. Subjects who had been induced to express their attitudes repeatedly, which should have the consequence of strengthening the object-evaluation association, have been found to be capable of responding relatively quickly to direct inquiries about their attitudes (Fazio et al., 1982;Powell & Fazio, 1984). For example, Powell and Fazio (1984) manipulated the number of times that an attitude was expressed by varying the number of semantic differential items that were listed relevant to a given attitude issue. In this way, subjects expressed their

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attitudes zero, one, three, or six times toward a given attitude object.' In a subsequent task, subjects were presented with each attitude issue and instructed to make a good-bad judgment about each object as quickly as possible. Response latency was found to relate to the number of previous attitudinal expressions. The greater the number of expressions, the faster the latency of response to an attitudinal inquiry. These findings lend credence to the view of attitudes as objectevaluation associations and suggest that attitude accessibility depends on the strength of the object-evaluationassociation. However, in terms of the process by which attitudes exert their influence, the critical issue is whether individuals's attitudes are activated from memory upon mere observation of the attitude object. These findings concern accessing one's attitude from memory in response to a direct inquiry. Thus, these findings are not at all informative with respect to the issue of spontaneous activation. Responding quickly to a direct attitudinal inquiry may mean that the stored evaluation was activated spontaneously upon presentation of the attitude issue. Alternatively, it may mean that the evaluation was retrieved efficiently via an effortful process. The distinction to be drawn at this point is one between automatic and controlled attitude activation. Automatic versus controlled processes have received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in cognitive psychology (e.g., Schneider & ShBrin, 1977; S h e i n & Schneider, 1977). Shiffrin and Dumais (1981) characterized any process that leads to the activation of some concept or response "whenever a given set of external initiating stimuli are presented, regardless of a subject's attempt to ignore or bypass the distraction" (p. 117) as automatic. The key feature of such automatic activation is its inescapability. In contrast, a controlled process requires the active attention of the individual. Thus, when an individual becomes aware of a situational cue that implies the importance of considering one's attitude toward an object, the individual might attempt to retrieve a previously stored evaluation of the attitude object or actively construct such an attitude on the spot. In either case, the process is reflective and effortful in nature. According to the model, attitudes can be activated automatically and the likelihood of such activation depends on the strength of the objectevaluation association. This hypothesis was confirmed in a recent series of experiments conducted by Fazio, Sanbonrnatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986). These experiments involved a priming procedure that permitted the ex'Our use of this manipulation is not intended to imply that object-evaluation associations must necessarily be semantic in nature. Strong object-evaluation associations could result, for example, from a classical conditioningof emotional responses.Repeated attitudinal expression merely provides one convenient vehicle by which associative strength can be manipulated.

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amination of the following hypothesis: The mere presentation of an attitude object toward which an individual possesses a strong evaluative association would automatically activate the evaluation. On each trial, the prime that was presented was the name of an attitude object. Its presentation was followed by the display of a positive or negative evaluative adjective. The subject's task was to press a key as quickly as possible to indicate whether the adjective had a positive or a negative connotation. The latency with which these judgments were made was examined. To provide an example, assume that the attitude object "cockroach" is evaluated negatively by an individual and that this object-evaluationassociation is strong. Presentation of "cockroach as the prime may automatically activate the negative evaluation. If the target adjective that is sbbsequently presented is also negative (e.g., esgusting), then the individual may be able to indicate relatively quickly that the target adjective has a negative connotation. That is, responding should be facilitated. Thus, the technique relies on the presence of facilitation as an indication that the evaluation associated with the primed attitude object has been activated upon its mere presentation. Precisely such facilitation was observed on trials that involved evaluatively congruent primes (attitude objects) and target adjectivesprovided that the attitude object possessed a strong evaluative association for the subject. In two of the experiments, preexperimentally strong and weak associations were identified via a measurement procedure. The measurement involved latency of response to an attitudinal inquiry-the same measure that had been shown in the research described earlier (e.g., Powell & Fazio, 1984) to reflect the strength of the object-evaluation association. Attitude objects for which the subject was able to respond relatively rapidly when faced with an attitudinal inquiry had served as the strong primes and those for which the subject responded relatively slowly as the weak primes. Only the former produced facilitation and, thus, showed any evidence of automatic attitude activation. In an additional experiment, strength of the object-evaluation association was manipulated rather than measured. Attitude objects for which subjects had been induced to express their attitudes repeatedly produced facilitation when the objects later served as primes in the adjective connotation task These findings provide corroboration for the hypothesis that the likelihood of automatic activation of an attitude upon mere observation of the attitude object depends on the strength of the object-evauation association in memory. The existence of facilitation suggests that the subject's attitude toward the object was activated automatically upon its mere presentation as the prime. Such a conclusion regarding automatism appears justifiable for two reasons. The first argument concerns the nature of the adjective connotation task. Subjectswere merely exposed to the attitude object and were

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not asked to consider their attitudes toward the object. Nor was it to the subjects' advantage to do so, for the subjects' major task was simply to respond to the target adjective. Nevertheless, despite this irrelevance of attitudes to the immediate task concerns, exposure to objects for which subjects possessed strong affective associations appears to have prompted activation of the associated evaluation. Thus, the very nature of the task leads to the suggestion that the facilitation observed in the case of strong primes was a result of automatic, rather than controlled, processing. A second basis for this conclusion stems from the fact that facilitationwas observed only under conditions that involved a relatively short interval between onset of the attitude object presented as the prime and onset of the target adjective, commonly referred to as the stimulus onset asynchrony or SOA. Under conditions involving a longer SOA, no facilitationwas observed. Yet, if the results had been due to a controlled, effortful process, one would have expected that allotting the subjects more time to actively retrieve their attitudes would have produced greater facilitation. Instead, the findings imply that the attitude was activated automatically upon presentation of the prime in the case of strong object-evaluationassociations. The level of activation of the associated evaluation was apparently s d c i e n t to facilitate responding to an evaluatively congruent target adjective if the adjective was presented very soon thereafter (SOA=300 mk). However, this level of activation apparently dissipated quickly (or was actively suppressed) due to the presumed irrelevance of the subject's attitudes to the major task of identifying the connotation of the target adjective. As a result, presentation of the target adjective 1,000 m/s after presentation of the attitude object appears to have been too late for the prime to facilitate responding to adjectives of congruent valence. Thus, the results of these experiments indicate that attitudes can be activated from memory automatically and that the strength of the object-evaluation association determines the likelihood of such automatic activation. The findings from the Fazio et al. (1986) series of experimentshave now been replicated a number of times. For example, Sanbonmatsu and Fazio (1986) employed the same adjective connotation task to examine the activation of attitudes toward brands of products. Brands toward which subjects possessed strongly associated evaluations (as indicated by fast latencies of response to direct attitudinal inquiries)produced facilitation on trials involving target adjectives of congruent valence. Brands involving weak object-evaluation associations did not. The results have also been replicated in the context of a perceptual recognition task rather than the adjective connotation task (Sanbonmatsu, Osborne, & Fazio, 1986). This new task involved having the target adjective gradually become legible on the computer screen. Initially, the adjective was masked by a block of dots, which gradually faded away on a random

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basis until only the letters of the word were visible. The subject's task was to recognize the word as quickly as possible. The degree to which presentation of an attitude object immediately prior to presentation of the target adjective facilitated recognition of the adjective served as the dependent measure. Replicating the past research, the findings revealed that positively valued attitude objects facilitated the recognition of positive adjectives and negatively valued attitude objects facilitated the recognition of negative adjectives. Furthermore, these effects were particularly apparent for attitude objects involving strong object-evaluationassociations, once again, as indicated by fast responding to a direct attitudinal inquiry.

The Attitude-Nonattitude Continuum The findings from the research on attitude accessibility clearly indicate that not all attitudes are equal. Of course, social psychologists have long recognized that attitudes vary in their "strength." A variety of attempts have been made to assess the centrality or importance of an attitude issue for a given individual. Social judgment theory's focus upon ego-involvementserves as an illustration of such an approach (Hovland, Harvey, & Sherif, 1957;Sherif & Canuil, 1947). More recently, various indices of the "strength of an attitude have been identified as moderators of the relation between attitudes and behavior, e.g., the confidence with which an attitude is held (Sample & Warland, 1973; Fazio & Zanna, 1978) and the consistency between affective and cognitive measures of the attitude (Norman, 1975). Relevant to this idea of attitudes varying in strength is the so-called attitude-nonattitude distinction. A number of years ago, both Hovland (1959) and Converse (1970) attempted to reconcile differences that had been observed between laboratory and survey research on attitude change. In so doing, they each-but Converse in particular-focused on a distinction between attitudes and nonattitudes. The distinction centered on the observation that a person may respond to an item on an attitude survey, even though that particular attitude does not really exist in any a priori fashion for the individual. That is, the attitude object may be one that the individual has not even considered prior to the administration of the survey. Converse (1970) discussed the attitude-nonattitude distinction in terms of measurement error. A nonattitude was characterized by unreliable measurement-virtually random response-across the waves of a panel survey. The present conceptualization of attitudes suggests that it may be fruitful to view the attitude-nonattitude distinction, not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum--one that focuses upon the accessibility of the attitude from memory. At the lower end of the continuum is the nonattitude. No a priori evaluation of the attitude object exists in memory. As we move along the continuum, an evaluation does exist and the strength of the association

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between that evaluation and the object and, hence, the chronic accessibility of the attitude, increases. In the case of a weak association, the attitude can be retrieved via an dortful, reflective process but is not capable of automatic activation. At the upper end of the continuum is a well-learned, strong association that is likely to be activated automatically upon mere observation or mention of the attitude object. The reader may be asking why the focus of the attitude-nonattitude continuum should be attitude accessibility as opposed to some other strength-related dimension of attitude. The advantage of doing so is the clear relevance of attitude accessibility to the issue of the process by which attitudes exert their influence. Unlike other indicants of the strength of an attitude (see Raden, 1985, for a recent review of such strength-related attitude dimensions), attitude accessibility operates at an information processing level of analysis and, hence, has implications for the mechanisms by which attitudes guide perceptions and behavior. Furthermore, attitude accessibility may be related to other qualities of the attitude that are reflective of attitudiial strength. Precisely such covariation has been hypothesized (Fazio et al., 1982; Fazio, 1986). It has been suggested that attitudinal qualities that have been identified as moderators of the attitude-behavior relation all may do so because they reflect the strength of the object-evaluation association and, the chronic accessibility of the attitude. Thus, attitude accessibility may provide a means of conceptually integrating the catalog of attitudinal qualities known to determine attitude-behavior consistency, as well as explaining why such moderating variables exert their impact. As an illustration, consider one such variable-the manner of attitude formation. Attitudes based upon direct, behavioral experience with the attitude object have been found to be stronger in many senses than attitudes based on indirect, nonbehavioral experience. Attitudes based on direct experience are more likely to influence later behavior (Fazio & Zanna, 1981), are held with greater confidence (Fazio & Zanna, 1978), and are more resistant to counterinfluence(Wu & Shaffer, 1987). Importantly, such attitudes also have been found to be more accessible from memory than attitudes based upon indirect experience-both in terms of latency of response to an attitudinal inquiry (Fazio et al., 1982; Fazio, Herr, & Olney, 1984) and in terms of the likelihood of activation upon mere presentation of the attitude object (Fazio, Powell, & Herr, 1983). It appears, then, that the differential power of direct vs. indirect experience attitudes is a reflection of their differentialposition along the attitude-nonattitude continuum. This.,continuum provides an interesting means of conceptualizing the strength of an attitude. Position along the continuum determines the power and functionality of the attitude, The attitudes of two individuals with identical scores from some attitude measurement instrument may still differ

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markedly with regard to their strength, that is, their Mcelihood of activation upon the individual's encountering the attitude object. The attitude of one individual may be activated in such a situation whereas the attitude of the other may not be. As a result, the attitude of the former individual is in a better position to influence perceptions and behavior and to ease decisionmaking than the attitude of the latter individual. It is to the power of accessible attitudes that the discussion now turns. ACCESSIBLE AmTUDES GUIDE INFORMATION PROCESSING "Attitudesdetermine for each individual what he will see and hear, what he 1935,p. 806)

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will think. . ." (Allport,

Presumably, one of the basic consequences of holding an attitude toward some object is that the attitude guides one's perceptions of the attitude object when it is encountered and the processing of information relevant to the attitude object. The present conceptualization of attitudes suggests that such selective processing is more likely for attitudes that are chronically accessible from memory. Such attitudes are apt to be activated automatically from memory upon observation or mention of the attitude object and, thus, are apt to serve as a filter through which available information is viewed. Without such activation of the attitude from memory, there can be no sense in which the attitude guides processing. A number of findings from our program of research on attitude accessibility converge on this notion that attitude accessibility governs the degree to which biased processing as a function of attitude occurs. One of the first approaches that was pursued to examine this issue centered on the principle that, once a construct has been activated from memory, the accessibility of that construct is temporarily increased. Such enhancement of acute accessibility has been shown to increase the likelihood that the construct will be applied to the interpretation of subsequently presented, relevant information (e.g., Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977; Srull & Wyer, 1979). That is, the primed and now highly accessible construct influences the interpretation of ambiguous information. In light of this principle, Fazio, Powell, and Herr (1983) primed positive or negative evaluative categories by exposing subjects to evaluative adjectives in the context of a Stroop color-word task. Some subjects were primed with: pleasant, exciting, entertaining, and amusing. In contrast, those in the negative condition were primed with: frustrating, irritating, tiresome, and dull. Then, in the context of an ostensibly separate experiment concerning person perception, subjects were presented with an ambiguous description

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