Focus on Psychology

Over the past 12 months, StMU and the psychology faculty members have created a fully functioning behaviour and attitudes (experimental) research laboratory. This ‘psych lab’ officially opened for research in January 2020 and incorporates traditional two-way mirrors and an observation room, as well as state-of-the-art audio and visual capture cameras and software. It has been equipped with five laptop computers that have been loaded with research software that enable psychology honours students and faculty to conduct in-person or online empirical studies. Although the psych lab is new and its use somewhat curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of studies have already been developed and run this year including one by a psychology honours student, Tiffany Biench, who conducted her thesis project research. Dr. Ron Porter has been working on a several studies (attitude measurement and wellness). Perhaps the most notable of Dr Porter’s research projects has been his examination of implicit and explicit attitude measurement. This research was recently support by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), who awarded Dr Porter an Insight Development grant of $55,000 to support his attitude measurement research over the next two years. Over the past 12 months, StMU and the psychology faculty members have created a fully functioning behaviour and attitudes (experimental) research laboratory. This ‘psych lab’ officially opened for research in January 2020 and incorporates traditional two-way mirrors and an observation room, as well as state-of-the-art audio and visual capture cameras and software. It has been equipped with five laptop computers that have been loaded with research software that enable psychology honours students and faculty to conduct in-person or online empirical studies. Although the psych lab is new and its use somewhat curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of studies have already been developed and run this year including one by a psychology honours student, Tiffany Biench, who conducted her thesis project research. Dr. Ron Porter has been working on a several studies (attitude measurement and wellness). Perhaps the most notable of Dr Porter’s research projects has been his examination of implicit and explicit attitude measurement. This research was recently support by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), who awarded Dr Porter an Insight Development grant of $55,000 to support his attitude measurement research over the next two years.

To better understand Dr Porter’s attitude research, it might be helpful to start with some background information.

For those who do not know, attitudes (i.e., our global positive, negative or ambivalent evaluations of people and objects) have long been of interest in areas of social behaviour such as intergroup relations, politics, and marketing, because they can strongly influence behaviour. Thus, in many applied settings, attitudes are measured to predict behaviour and/or are the target of persuasive appeals in an attempt to influence behaviour. However, accurately determining people’s attitudes is not always straightforward. Although it is effective to directly ask someone about their attitude, sometimes these measures can be problematic. First, when attitudes are related to socially sensitive topics, people might not honestly report their attitudes if those attitudes could have a negative impact on the impressions others form of them. Second, people might sometimes have relatively automatic non-thoughtful attitudinal responses (implicit) that differ from their more thoughtful and deliberative attitudinal judgments (explicit). Because traditional self-report measures are strongly shaped by thoughtful considerations, they often fail to capture more spontaneous evaluative responses.

In response to these limitations, researchers have developed indirect implicit attitude measures. These measures do not ask respondents to directly report their attitudes, but instead ask them to perform a judgmental task related to the target attitude object that is presumed to be spontaneously influenced by people’s attitudinal responses. Because these measures reflect the effects of attitudes outside of people’s active intentional control, they are less vulnerable to impression management concerns and less reflective of thoughtful considerations. Numerous implicit measures of attitudes have been developed including the Implicit Association Task (IAT), Affective Priming, (AP), and the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP).

Although implicit attitude measures have been a central topic in attitudes research over the past two decades, interest in indirect measures of attitudes goes back more than 80 years. Unfortunately, none of these early indirect attitude measures gained popularity among researchers and early attempts at indirect measurement have generally been regarded as ineffective. While the performance of many of these measures was clearly disappointing, a few of the measures demonstrated some promise, notably the Error-Choice (EC) Technique.

The EC involves presenting people with a series of multiple-choice factual questions related to the target object of interest. These questions are constructed such that their answers are: a) in principle knowable, b) in practice unlikely to be known by respondents, and c) reflect varying levels of positivity versus negativity toward the target object. For example, an EC assessing attitudes towards homosexuals might include an item asking respondents to indicate what percentage of Canadians reported feeling embarrassed or ashamed when a close relative who is gay made their sexual orientation public. The EC rests on two premises. First, when people are faced with a knowledge-based question for which they do not know the answer, their guesses will not be random; an important factor that they will rely upon is their attitudes. When answering a question regarding sexual orientation, people with positive attitudes will tend to select low percentage answers and people with negative attitudes will tend to select higher percentage answers. Thus, across a series of such questions, one might expect to find a systematic guess pattern that is consistent with their attitudes. The second premise of the EC is that, because each item is presented as a factual question, people will not be aware that their attitudes are being assessed. Early research suggested that the EC had promise, but its performance was never fully evaluated in subsequent research. Recent pilot data collected in earlier studies provided further encouraging evidence.

Specifically, answers to EC questions do appear to reflect a single systematic response pattern that is comparatively reliable and at least in part represents the respondent’s attitude. These studies also suggest that (as intended) this response pattern to the EC questions is highly resistant to impression management concerns.

Nonetheless, important questions remain unresolved. Over the next two years of his SSHRC funding research, Dr Porter will conduct a series of experiments in the psych lab that will set out to accomplish two primary goals. First, it is unclear if the systematic guessing pattern captured by the EC is sufficiently attitudinal in nature such that it provides a valid measure of attitudes. It is possible that a substantial amount of the variation in guess patterns reflects systematic measurement error unrelated to the respondent’s attitudes. To establish the validity of the EC, it is important to show that scores are responsive to events known to influence attitudes and to demonstrate that scores can predict known consequences of attitudes. Second, even assuming that the EC measures attitudes, it is unclear if it reflects thoughtful (explicit) evaluations or more spontaneous (implicit) evaluative reactions. Popular implicit measures such as the IAT involve speeded judgmental tasks and thus tend to capture more automatic evaluative responses. To date, no validated indirect measure of attitudes exists that captures people’s more thoughtful (explicit) evaluative judgments. However, because the EC provides people with items that require response processes similar to traditional self-report scales (which are strongly shaped by thoughtful considerations) and do not require rapid judgmental tasks, it is possible that the EC reflects more thoughtful attitudinal responses. If so, the EC could be a relatively unique tool: a measure of thoughtful attitudinal judgments that is highly resistant to impression management. Thus, evaluating the thoughtful versus non-thoughtful nature of EC responses is an important issue for gauging the potential utility of the EC.

If these studies are successful, they would lay the foundation for use in applied setting. For example, because it is more easily administered than current implicit measures of attitude (e.g., IAT, AMP, etc.) it would enable organizations to identify employees’ attitudes towards socially sensitive topics. For example, discriminatory attitudes towards underrepresented groups. This would then enable organizations to develop training and intervention programs to assist in developing and maintaining a more positive work climate.