Changes in attitudes

In order to change a person’s attitude, it is necessary to provide some additional information that will influence either the extent of the attitude’s strength, or its direction. There is some evidence that attitudes may be changed through direct exposure to an attitude object. In the case of foods produced with novel technologies, a person who has a very negative attitude towards the technology may change their attitude following experience with products made with the technology. Most usually, however, the attitudinal effects of direct exposure are difficult to detect because the effects are masked by information about the attitude object, beliefs about the motives of information sources, or other contextual factors associated with exposure. Exposure to an attitude object in itself may provide information about the characteristics of the object, but will produce attitude change only if the new information is very different from what is already known about the object by an individual (Stroebe et al., 1988).

A second approach to attitude change relies on persuasive communication, which is theoretically underpinned by theories of social influence. A position is advocated by an information source, and different messages are presented by the information source to support this position. Persuasion frequently focuses on counter attitudinal-communication (advocating a position that does not align with attitudes already held by the individual receiving the information). Theories of persuasion use the processes or variables that mediate the impact of communication on attitudes and beliefs. Hovland (1959) has argued that, if people do not attend a message, (i.e. if they are not motivated to so do because the information is not useful or interesting), attitude change will not occur.

Similarly, if they are unable to comprehend it despite being highly motivated to think about the information, then their attitudes will not change. People may also use two different routes to processing information (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). The first of these is the central route to persuasion when people spend a considerable amount of effort on critically evaluating the message content. However, if people are loath to expend this amount of effort on processing message contents, they adopt peripheral routes to persuasion – for example, information sources which they trust or like may result in more positive evaluation of the message which the source provides (Eagly and Chaiken, 1984). Petty and Cacioppo (1986) have proposed that attitude change will be the result of both the amount of message-relevant thinking as well as the extent to which people agree with the information. For messages that elicit favourable thoughts, increased elaboration (i.e. increased thoughts about the message content) should increase persuasion. In contrast, if messages elicit mainly negative thoughts, increased processing should reduce persuasion. From this, one might extrapolate that simply telling people that products are safe is unlikely to provide the reassurance that results in public support of genetically modified foods, unless this belief is already strongly held by those people receiving the message. People who are already rather concerned about genetically modified foods are unlikely to internalise messages which have an opposite valence to those which they already hold. To some extent, this is supported by the empirical evidence available, and will be discussed in a later section.