BBVA Foundation awards the psychologists who changed the way we understand and predict human behavior

According to the committee’s report, the awardees have “made a telling contribution to predicting and understanding human behavior, elucidating how people are persuaded, what hidden biases they may have, and how attitudes can be changed.”

Their research already has practical applications in various fields, ranging from the design of vaccination campaigns and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases to strategies to fight fake news and conspiracy theories, or formulas to include valid evidence in trials. In addition, their contributions to attitude theory can help policy makers and other social agents “prevent negative societal consequences such as polarization, ethnic prejudices and unfounded stereotypes.”

Attitudes that explain behavior and provide clues on how to change it

Attitude theory, as the citation remarks, has proved highly influential across a large tract of the social sciences, precisely because of the relationship between attitude and behavior. Icek Ajzen, Professor of Social Psychology, Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, elaborated on this relationship, with the late Martin Fishbein, in one of social psychology’s most celebrated models for explaining and predicting human behavior: the theory of planned behavior (TPB).

“In my model,” says Ajzen, “attitudes are one of the three prongs that determine behavior, alongside social influence and the means that a person has to carry it out. The weight of each factor depends on the behavior you’re dealing with and the context.” It has been found, for instance, that in advanced societies like the United States the chance of a person getting vaccinated against a pandemic like COVID 19 “will depend essentially on their personal attitude to that behavior, based on whether they think it is worth getting the jab.” In African countries, conversely, “what counts most is the difficulty. It’s more a question of control, of getting access to the vaccine.”

Ajzen is proud to state that his model has been applied in over 2,000 research projects in the past forty years. These run from public health (the promotion of vaccination, the use of condoms to prevent AIDS or the practice of physical activity) to the environment (for example, how to encourage use of public transportation over private vehicles by facilitating citizens’ access to subway or bus lines).

Persuasion: attitudes as a route to behavior change

The relationship between attitudes and behavior can also be studied through the lens of persuasion (understood as a process of social influence over the individual), given its power to alter a person’s attitudes and therefore their behavior.

Known as the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), it owes its existence to Richard Petty, working with the late John Cacioppo.  “What’s probably the most unique thing about our theory is that it says that the very same variable – whether it’s how much you like the source or how many arguments a source presents – can lead to more influence or less influence depending on the situation; whether the recipient is motivated and able to think about what the source is saying or not,” he explains.

“We discovered that if thinking is responsible for a person’s change, really carefully scrutinizing the information that they receive as opposed to just relying on how much they like the source or how many arguments they are given, the change that’s produced lasts longer and is likelier to impact that person’s behavior.”

In recent research on the factors conducive to a belief in conspiracy theories, Petty has found that feeling threatened about a particular attitude leads a person to adopt even more extreme positions as a way of reaffirming the strength of their conviction: “Being judged by others, especially if I think those others are looking down on me, is a threat to my view. And so to defend my view or to compensate for that threat, I might adopt a position that’s even more extreme or even favor more extreme behavior.”

Strategies to deal with disinformation and conspiracy theories

The research done by Dolores Albarracín has increased our understanding of “how attitudes can be changed, particularly with regard to persuasive messages,” in the words of the award committee.

For Albarracín, “attitude theory can help us predict the kind of disinformation we have to deal with most urgently. For instance, believing the Earth is flat has no direct impact on a person’s conduct, but believing vaccines are harmful can dissuade someone from getting a jab, with consequences for their own health and public health in general.  What the evidence is telling us is that since we can’t stem the whole tide of disinformation, the best strategy is to intervene where it has a direct negative effect.”

As to how to intervene, she says that “attempting to argue down the misguided belief is just not effective. It’s better to opt for a ‘bypass’ and try to replace that belief by one that holds up, arguing let’s say for the benefits of vaccines or transgenic foods.”

The unconscious processes that shape attitudes: implicit bias

Meanwhile, the other two award winners, namely Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, developed the implicit association test (IAT), which enables reliable measurement of implicit bias and its effects on decision-making.

“We gave people a chance to experience it and they were very surprised by the results. In the first test, we applied what we called the race attitude IAT. Taking it myself, I discovered I had a stronger association of black with unpleasant than with pleasant and the reverse for white. And that implicit attitude was one that I didn’t at all want to have and in fact didn’t know I had,” remarks Greenwald.

The IAT allows us to measure and better understand attitudes that are hard to measure via self-diagnostic techniques, either because the subjects themselves are not aware of their attitudes or because some prejudices, like racism or sexism, are socially frowned on. “We know that these biases kick in at a very young age, from about two years old. And they are also much more widespread in the population than the explicit biases that people admit to in self-report measures; saying, for instance, that men are not better at science than women.”

Meanwhile, Banaji has corroborated these results with neuroimaging techniques, observing that the amygdala – the part of the brain that responds to the new or strange – reacts more strongly to black versus white faces the greater the racial bias revealed by the IAT. And she has also been able to show that such biases may not be innate but are nonetheless acquired at a very young age:  “Children of six have the same levels of implicit bias as adults.”

She recently turned her attention to analyzing the presence of these biases in online texts. Using a database of 840,000 words collected in 2014 and 2017, she found that the most frequent associations for “man” or “male” had to do with war and sports, while the words “woman” and “female” were predominantly associated with abuse and pornography, as well as cooking and motherhood. Motivated by these data, she has now focused on analyzing bias in language-based generative artificial intelligence models such as Chat-GPT.

Professor Banaji is now applying the science of social cognition to put forward strategies to mitigate the effects of implicit bias on individuals and workplace teams. “I would say diversity training went wrong in a few different ways. It was preachy. It was not evidence based. But when you come to it through science, humbly, without judging, you get the same result without anyone having to feel demeaned.”