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Main Ideas

1. Explaining Attitudes Can Sometimes Weaken Them

Reason-generated attitude change occurs when people think about and verbalize why they hold an attitude.

Consumers may assume that the reasons they can easily explain are the true reasons for their preferences. But feelings are not always easy to explain, so people may supply reasons that do not actually account for what they like. If someone struggles to explain why they like a brand, they may wrongly conclude that they do not like it very much, weakening a positive brand attitude.

Marketing implication: Companies should be cautious about asking customers to justify why they like a product or brand.

2. Self-Perception Theory

Self-perception theory proposes that people sometimes infer their attitudes and feelings by observing their own behavior.

For example, someone who is unsure whether they like chocolate cake might notice that they chose to eat it yesterday and the week before. They may infer from those choices that they do like it.

Marketing application: Companies can encourage consumers to try products through free samples of food or cosmetics, or through car test drives. Consumers may interpret their own use of a product as evidence that they like it.

3. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Motivation is the need, drive, or desire to act in a certain way to reach an end.

• Intrinsic motivation: Doing an activity because it is interesting or enjoyable.
• Extrinsic motivation: Doing an activity because of an external reward, pressure, or requirement—for example, earning course credit.

The lecture describes an experiment involving two boys who usually played games for about two hours a day:

1. Baseline week: The boys played for their usual amount of time.
2. Reward week: Their parents gave them a small monetary reward for playing. The boys were happy about the reward and played longer than usual.
3. Follow-up week: The rewards stopped, and the boys played less than they had during the baseline week.

The lecture uses this result to illustrate that external rewards can sometimes reduce intrinsic interest in an activity. It then poses a reaction-paper question: In light of this effect, what should companies do—or avoid doing—to attract customers?

4. Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

The two-factor theory says that emotional experience involves two steps:

1. A person experiences physiological arousal, such as a faster heartbeat.
2. The person interprets that arousal using cues from the situation and assigns it an emotional meaning.

The same arousal can be interpreted differently depending on context. A party may lead someone to label it excitement, an upcoming exam may lead them to label it anxiety, and a conversation with a romantic interest may lead them to interpret it as attraction. People can sometimes misattribute the cause of their arousal.

5. Suspension-Bridge Field Experiment

The lecture describes a study by Dutton and Aron (1974):

• An attractive woman asked men to complete a questionnaire and gave them her phone number.
• In one condition, she approached men while they were crossing a high, swaying suspension bridge over a deep canyon. Crossing the bridge caused noticeable physiological arousal.
• In the other condition, she approached men after they had crossed the bridge and rested on a bench.
• More men approached on the bridge later called her to ask for a date than men approached after resting.

The lecture interprets this as evidence that some men may have mistaken bridge-induced arousal for attraction to the woman.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Lecturer: Unidentified speaker presenting the lesson.
• Daryl Bem (1972): Cited in connection with self-perception theory.
• Stanley Schachter (1964): Cited in connection with the two-factor theory of emotion.
• Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron (1974): Cited for the suspension-bridge field experiment.