Description:

The Northwestern University Colloquium Series Presents:

Dolores Albarracin

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"Attitudes: A Classic Look from a Contemporary Perspective"

Abstract: Attitudes –evaluations of objects, people, and events—are consequential for society and an important focus of the field of psychology for over a century. Research on attitudes has comprised about 20% of the articles appearing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology since its first publication. In my own work, I have asked a number of questions that I believe are central to our understanding of attitudes as a function of personal and situational factors. The first question concerns general attitudes, which are evaluations that apply across objects and behaviors. Dispositional attitudes, for example, are useful in identifying the haters and the lovers in a social group. Attitudes towards general action reveal greater cultural and individual value for action, relative to inaction, with considerable disregard for the behavior being considered. The second question addressed in my research is how much attitudes change and how they change. Specifically, I will discuss how asking new questions in subtle ways shapes our preferences, which are an external manifestation of our attitudes. I will then describe how, ironically, attitude change can depend on people feeling strong enough to seek information that ultimately defeats their attitudes, how external information produces more attitude change when it is actionable, and how the communicator and the message exert dynamic effects on attitudes over time.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

4:00 pm, Swift Hall 107

Reception to follow