Page 158 - The Social Animal

140 The Social Animal

The Attitude Heuristic An attitude is a special type of belief
that includes emotional and evaluative components; in a sense, an at-
titude is a stored evaluation—good or bad—of an object. According
to Anthony Pratkanis and Anthony Greenwald, people tend to use
the attitude heuristic as a way of making decisions and solving prob-
38
lems. Attitudes can be used to assign objects to a favorable class (for
which strategies of favoring, approaching, praising, cherishing, and
protecting are appropriate) or to an unfavorable category (for which
strategies of disfavoring, avoiding, blaming, neglecting, and harming
are used). For example, if John dislikes former President Ronald Rea-
gan, then, when John thinks about the current federal deficit, he is
apt to attribute its cause to the “charge card” economic policies Rea-
gan employed in the 1980s.
Much research has shown that attitudes can be used to make
sense of our social world. For example, a study by Anthony Pratka-
nis found that a person’s attitudes play a major role in determining
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what he or she “knows” to be true. In this study, college students
were asked to identify which of two possible statements—such as the
following—was true:

a. Ronald Reagan maintained an A average at Eureka College.
b. Ronald Reagan never achieved above a C average at Eureka
College.

What did Pratkanis find? Very few people actually know what
Reagan’s college grades were; their answer depended on their attitude
toward him. Students who liked Reagan were more likely to believe
statement (a); students who disliked him were more likely to believe
statement (b). What is more, the more extreme the attitude toward
Reagan, the more confidence the students had in their judgments. In
other words, the students in this study used their attitudes as a
heuristic to discern what is true and then believed that what they de-
termined was correct. For those of you who are curious, statement (b)
is correct. Reagan never achieved above a C average in college. (I has-
ten to add that this is an actual fact and has nothing to do with my
personal attitude toward Mr. Reagan!)
The use of an attitude heuristic can influence our logic and abil-
ity to reason. For example, in the late 1940s, Donald Thistlewaite 40
asked respondents to state whether syllogisms such as the following
were valid: