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Open Access
Peer-reviewed
Research Article
- Arnout R. H. Fischer ,
- Heleen van Dijk ,
- Hans C. M. van Trijp
Affect and Cognition in Attitude Formation toward Familiar and Unfamiliar Attitude Objects
- Roxanne I. van Giesen,
- Arnout R. H. Fischer,
- Heleen van Dijk,
- Hans C. M. van Trijp
x
- Published: October 30, 2015
- //doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141790
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Abstract
At large attitudes are built on earlier experience with the attitude object. If earlier experiences are not available, as is the case for unfamiliar attitude objects such as new technologies, no stored evaluations exist. Yet, people are still somehow able to construct attitudes on the spot. Depending on the familiarity of the attitude object, attitudes may find their basis more in affect or cognition. The current paper investigates differences in reliance on affect or cognition in attitude formation toward familiar and unfamiliar realistic attitude objects. In addition, individual differences in reliance on affect [high faith in intuition] or cognition [high need for cognition] are taken into account. In an experimental survey among Dutch consumers [N = 1870], we show that, for unfamiliar realistic attitude objects, people rely more on affect than cognition. For familiar attitude objects where both affective and cognitive evaluations are available, high need for cognition leads to more reliance on cognition, and high faith in intuition leads to more reliance on affect, reflecting the influence of individually preferred thinking style. For people with high need for cognition, cognition has a higher influence on overall attitude for both familiar and unfamiliar realistic attitude objects. On the other hand, affect is important for people with high faith in intuition for both familiar and unfamiliar attitude objects and for people with low faith in intuition for unfamiliar attitude objects; this shows that preferred thinking style is less influential for unfamiliar objects. By comparing attitude formation for familiar and unfamiliar realistic attitude objects, this research contributes to understanding situations in which affect or cognition is the better predictor of overall attitudes.
Citation: van Giesen RI, Fischer ARH, van Dijk H, van Trijp HCM [2015] Affect and Cognition in Attitude Formation toward Familiar and Unfamiliar Attitude Objects. PLoS ONE 10[10]: e0141790. //doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141790
Editor: Philip Allen, University of Akron, UNITED STATES
Received: January 8, 2015; Accepted: October 13, 2015; Published: October 30, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 van Giesen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.
Funding: This work was supported by NanoNextNL to RVG AF HVD HVT, a micro and nanotechnology consortium of the Government of the Netherlands and 130 partners. More information on www.nanonextnl.nl. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have the following interests: This work was supported by NanoNextNL. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
Affect and Cognition in Attitude Formation toward Familiar and Unfamiliar Attitude Objects
Attitudes are built on earlier experience and help people to make sense of their environment [1]. As such, attitudes play a central role in life and make up a large part of our daily thoughts, emotions, and behavioural processes [2]. If earlier experiences are not available, as is the case for unfamiliar attitude objects, people still construct attitudes on the spot in order to respond to unfamiliar situations or attitude objects [3]. While attitudes are formed for both familiar and unfamiliar objects, the way in which these attitudes are formed can be different. The current paper investigates differences between attitude formation toward familiar and unfamiliar realistic attitude objects.
Individuals confronted with familiar attitude objects have stored evaluations in memory. If we consider attitudes as summary object-evaluation linkages and/or object-feature-evaluation linkages [4] that find their basis in cognitive and affective associations in memory [1, 5, 6], there are extensive object-evaluation linkages available for familiar objects. After individuals have been repeatedly exposed to attitude objects, additional exposures have reinforced such associations through a process of conditioning, especially if accumulating evidence has been consistent with prior knowledge [7, 8]. This results in a stable, crystallised attitude [3] that can draw upon learned cognitions such as facts and statements [9] but also in learned emotional responses such as somatic markers that are associated with past outcomes [10] and learned regulation of emotion [11]. Having an established knowledge base, consisting of relevant affective and cognitive information and experience, allows the formation of attitudes based on both cognition and affect [9, 12].
Individuals confronted with unfamiliar attitude objects, however, do not have a fully fledged evaluation of the object stored in memory. People are, nevertheless, somehow able to construct attitudes toward unfamiliar attitudes on the spot, based on whatever relevant associations are available in the current context [1, 3, 13, 14]. This raises the question what object-feature linkages will become available while constructing attitudes toward unfamiliar attitude objects. It is consistently found that, after repeated exposure to a stimulus, people will begin to react more positively to a once-novel attitude object, even without conscious evaluation [14–16]. This provides evidence that affective responses happen more quickly and possibly do not even require cognitive evaluations of attitude objects. In this way, affective object-feature linkages can rapidly emerge toward unfamiliar attitude objects. In realistic contexts, new attitude objects will rarely exist in complete isolation from anything encountered before, since attitude objects generally do not exist independently of social processes and other contextual factors [17]. Hence, in a realistic context, people will have been exposed [unconsciously or otherwise] to some features around the unfamiliar attitude object and can infer meaning from existing knowledge about related familiar attitude objects [18]. Therefore, some object-feature linkages for unfamiliar attitude objects will become activated, even if no cognitive elaboration on the new object has ever taken place. In such cases, where no cognitive inferences have yet been developed, affective responses can already be mobilised [14, 19]. This could explain why affect consistently contributes to attitude formation of unfamiliar realistic attitude objects such as, for example, carbon dioxide storage, genetic modification of food products and nanotechnology [see, for example, [20, 21]]. Supporting this line of reasoning is previous research that has shown that attitudes in cases with a lack of concrete factual information are often based on affect [22, 23], which, compared to cognitive weighing of pros and cons, requires less formal information in decision-making [24]. By serving as information regarding how one feels about the attitude object, these affective associations are able to influence judgements even in the absence of crystallised cognitive or affective object-feature-evaluation linkages. In the absence of clear object-evaluation linkages, a decision based on affect is often more informative than one based on cognition, as people can more easily access the broader range of affective feelings than the few available cognitive associations [25, 26]. Hence, in situations of limited knowledge, it is more likely that people will access affective assocations toward an unfamiliar object than construct cognitive object linkages.
In this way, depending on familiarity, attitudes may find their basis in more or less elaborate affective object linkages [feelings and emotions] and/or cognitive object linkages [beliefs and thoughts] [27, 28], which represent the affective and cognitive attitude components of the overall attitude [9, 29].
Therefore our first hypothesis is:
- H1: Affect will have a relatively stronger association with overall attitude for unfamiliar than for familiar attitude objects, whereas cognition will have a relatively weaker association with overall attitude for unfamiliar than for familiar attitude objects.
Although, in the process of attitude formation, people in principle have access to a rich network of cognitive and affective feature evaluations, in most daily decisions they are unlikely to access all of that information. If the object is familiar, that is in cases where both cognitive and affective object-evaluation linkages are available, individuals are at liberty to use any combination of affective object-evaluation or cognitive object-evaluation linkages that leads to a clear evaluation. Differences in individual preferences for affect or cognition will play an important role in determining to what extent people rely more on affect or cognition in attitude formation in this type of situation. Some people have a high versus low need for cognition and/or high versus low faith in intuition, reflecting differences in reliance on rational cognitive resources and affective intuitive resources. People with a high need for cognition rely on the cognitive system, making cognitive beliefs important in forming judgements [30–32], while people with a high faith in intuition rely on the intuitive system and show a strong reliance on feelings in their judgements [31–33]. People with a clear preferred thinking style [high need for cognition and low faith in intuition or vice versa] will rely on either cognition or on affect, depending on their preference. For instance, people with a high faith in intuition seek out affective information while forming attitudes and are more strongly persuaded by affective messages. In the same way people with a high need for cognition, look for cognitive information while forming attitudes [34]. In this way chronic individual differences are important determinants why attitudes are more affect-based or cognition-based [35].
If the object is unfamiliar, however, cognitive object-evaluation linkages are hardly available, while affective-evaluation linkages remain to a larger extent available. For unfamiliar attitude objects, individuals are restricted in relying on cognitive evaluations and therefore can only fall back on more intuitive and affective processes. Thus, even when individuals have a high need for cognition, an analytical approach to information processing might fall short for unfamiliar objects [36]. It is therefore expected that, for unfamiliar attitude objects, a preference for a cognitive thinking style will not relevantly shift the process to a more cognition-driven process. As affect is less dependent on information, affect will have a similarly high influence on the overall attitude for both familiar and unfamiliar attitude objects, for people having a high faith in intuition. A high influence of affect on overall attitude is expected even in the case of low faith in intuition for unfamiliar attitude objects. Thus, for unfamiliar attitude objects individual differences might not always be important determinants why attitudes are more affect-based or cognition-based.
Hence, we hypothesise that:
- H2a: For familiar attitude objects cognition will have a relatively stronger association with overall attitude for individuals with high need for cognition, compared with low need for cognition.
- H2b: For unfamiliar attitude objects, cognition will not have a relatively stronger association with overall attitude for individuals with high need for cognition, compared with low need for cognition.
- H3a: For familiar attitude objects affect will have a relatively stronger association with overall attitude for individuals with high faith in intuition, compared with low faith in intuition.
- H3b: For unfamiliar attitude objects affect will have a relatively stronger association with overall attitude for individuals with both high and low faith in intuition.
Study
The hypotheses were tested in an experimental survey in the Netherlands in the context of technological applications. Nanotechnology, an existing yet little known novel technology, was used to study a range of unfamiliar attitude objects. The range of unfamiliar nanotechnology attitude objects was compared comparing to a similar range of familiar variants. Nanotechnology provides a good research context to operationalise unfamiliar realistic attitude objects as, at the time of the study, people had limited knowledge about nanotechnology and its applications [37]. Nanotechnology is involved with the manipulation of materials at the smallest possible physical levels [i.e. molecular or atomic levels]. It enables the creation of completely new products, as well as the substantial improvement of properties of existing products [38]. By focusing on nanotechnology-facilitated improvement of existing products, nanotechnology not only provides a good research context to operationalise realistic unfamiliar attitude objects but also allows for comparison between similar unfamiliar and familiar attitude objects. Nanotechnology also allows us to select from a broad range of applications, which may be associated with different potential advantages and disadvantages, helping to show robustness of results.
Method
Respondents
Data were collected by a commercial market research agency [GfK; see www.gfk.com], as the first wave in a longitudinal study. Respondents were drawn from an existing panel for which respondents voluntarily registered. The research complies with the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Scientific Practice and the Social Sciences Ethics Committee of Wageningen University waived the need for ethical consent. There were no misleading questions in the survey, and the questions did not cause discomfort to respondents. The participants opted into this study that was conducted online through the market research agency GfK. The authors did not have access to any identifying information about the participants as GfK anonymized and de-identified all data prior to author access.
As the socio-demographic information of panel members is known to the research agency, the panel allows for stratified random sampling of a nationally representative sample on gender, age, and education level of the Netherlands. The panel consists of approximately 12,000 respondents, who are repeatedly invited to participate in studies. The panel is maintained through a range of sampling techniques, taking care that the panel remains representative for the population. Agreement to join the panel is between 10% and 35% among those invited; about 20% of panel members are replaced each year. Data were collected in the Netherlands between 16 October and 6 November 2012. The research agency approached a gross sample of 2500 respondents from their panel, of whom 1907 participated [response rate of 76%]. Of these, 51% were male, 28% have a low education level [primary school, vocational education], 45% have an intermediate [secondary vocational education], and 27% have a high education level [university of applied sciences, or university]. The mean age of respondents was 43 years [SD = 13.2 years, age range 18–65 years].
Inspection of responses on all variables showed highly unlikely response patterns for 37 respondents, who had zero variance on all variables. These 37 respondents were removed prior to analyses [valid N = 1870]. After removing these respondents, no further univariate and multivariate outliers were detected.
Design
Respondents judged a total of four applications. Each respondent was asked to rate both familiar [non-nanotechnology] applications and the related unfamiliar [nanotechnology] applications. In addition, each respondent was asked to judge applications from two out of four application domains [either water and energy, or medicine and food]. Within each application domain, two different applications were specified. Each respondent judged in total four of the sixteen available applications, as an incomplete repeated measures factor across four domains. The combinations of stimuli as presented to groups of respondents can be found in Table 1.
Stimuli
Technological applications.
Stimuli were 16 vignettes of technological applications. These consisted of a set of eight familiar and eight unfamiliar [nano] applications with the same purpose to operationalise different levels of familiarity. For example, a conventional solar panel was included as a familiar attitude object and a nano-based solar panel was included as an unfamiliar attitude object. Four application domains were included that cover the key areas of nanotechnology research and development: food, water purification, medicine, and energy [39]. For each domain, two different applications were selected—food additives and food supplements, water purification and water quality monitoring, medical home tests and drugs, solar energy and batteries—to provide replications, allowing us to control for specific application and domain associations.
Respondents received a short description of an application, consisting of some information about the technology behind the application, examples in which the application can be used, and some advantages and disadvantages of the application. The order of the information on advantages and disadvantages was randomised. Descriptions were checked by an expert on nanotechnology for realism of content. Scenarios of pairs of applications [familiar versus unfamiliar] were matched as much as possible in content and length. An example of a scenario is provided in File A in S1 appendix [translated from Dutch].
Four sequential pilot studies were conducted to improve the materials iteratively. The first three pilot studies were conducted with students from Wageningen University, and the final pilot study was conducted on a more diversified sample. Scenarios were adapted until comprehensibility, credibility, and emotional neutrality, as well as the purpose, advantage, and disadvantage of the familiar and unfamiliar applications, were comparable; at the same time, the nano applications remained less familiar compared to corresponding alternatives [see Table A in S1 appendix for details].
Measures
Respondents were asked whether they had heard of nanotechnology [‘yes/no’] and whether they knew what nanotechnology means [‘yes/no’]. To assess whether familiarity with the selected applications differed between the nano and the conventional applications, respondents were asked to indicate for each application whether they had heard of the application.
Affective attitude. The affective attitude component was measured with an affective judgement scale, consisting of four items measuring positive emotions [joy, desire, fascination, satisfaction] and four items measuring negative emotions [fear, boredom, sadness, and disgust] [see [40, 41]]. Respondents were asked to indicate to what degree they experienced each of the emotions when reading about the application, on a seven-point Likert scale [1 = ‘not at all’, 7 = ‘very much’].
Cognitive attitude. The cognitive attitude component was measured with a cognitive judgement scale, consisting of four items measuring positive cognition [useful, functional, beneficial, nice] and four items measuring negative cognition [useless, harmful, disadvantageous, unusable] [based on [42]]. Respondents were asked to indicate to what degree they think each of the cognitions applied when reading about the application on a seven-point Likert scale [ranging from ‘not at all’ to ‘very much’].
Scale dimensions.
In order to verify that the cognitive and affective items tapped into different attitude components, a hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis [CFA] was conducted with maximum likelihood in the R package Lavaan [43]. Comparative fit index [CFI] and Tucker Lewis Index [TLI] values above .95, and root mean square error of estimation [RMSEA] values below .07 were adopted as indication of good fit. χ² is reported as customary, but not indicative of model fit with large samples [44]. Confirmatory factor analyses [CFA] were conducted on all key concepts [affect, cognition, overall attitude] taking into account the negative versus positive wording of items [45]. After removal of the ‘boredom’ [affective negative] and ‘nice’ [cognitive positive] items, which did not load onto their respective factor, the CFA showed a good fit χ² [63] = 1476.74, p