On the Functional Value of Attitudes: The Influence of Accessible Attitudes on the Ease and Quality of Decision Making

Abstract

A series of experiments relevant to the functional value of accessible attitudes is reported. Experiment 1 established that diastolic blood pressure was sensitive to the task demands involved in subjects' expression of a preference between pairs of abstract paintings. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects who had developed and rehearsed attitudes toward the individual paintings displayed a smaller elevation in diastolic blood pressure while performing this pairwise preference task than control subjects, suggesting that attitudes can ease decision making. Experiment 4 provided converging evidence for this hypothesis in that faster decision latencies were observed during the pairwise preference task when subjects had previously developed accessible attitudes toward the individual paintings. Evidence was also obtained suggesting that accessible attitudes enhanced the quality of the decisions made during the pairwise preference task.

A Longitudinal Examination of the Association Between Psychological Capital, Perception of Organizational Virtues and Work Happiness in School Staff

“…The underlying explanation for this rests on the idea of attitudes. Attitudes have been found to help categorize objects (Smith et al 1996), assist decision-making ease (Blascovich et al 1993) and decisionmaking quality (Fazio et al 1992). Thus employees with optimistic attitudes could be more likely to evaluate virtuous practices and policies within the organization through a lens of optimism.…”

Attitudes as Object–Evaluation Associations of Varying Strength

“…For example, attitude rehearsal has been shown to ease later decisionmaking, decreasing the resources that are needed to reach evaluative decisions. When asked to make rapid decisions about their preferences between pairs of objects, individuals who had earlier been induced to develop and rehearse attitudes toward novel objects displayed less cardiovascular reactivity than individuals who had been exposed to the objects equally often but in the context of a task that was unrelated to attitudes (Blascovich, et al, 1993;Fazio, Blascovich, & Driscoll, 1992). Likewise, less reactivity was exhibited when individuals made decisions involving objects for which they had earlier rehearsed attitudes than objects for which they had not (Blascovich, et al, 1993).…”

Response latency in social psychological research

“…Additional support for the link between attitudinal expression and accessibility was drawn from a study where participants evaluated paintings (Fazio, Blascovich, & Driscoll, 1992). Again, response latency was used to demonstrate differences in ease of accessibility, thus demonstrating the robustness of the link to attitudinal expression and its potential application to all manner of attitude objects.…”