Attitudes Flashcards
what are beliefs and what are attitudes?
belief: pieces of information about something based on information gathering, not always an objective or rigorous scientific process; serve a utilitarian function which helps us navigate the world and make progress towards goals.
attitude: person’s evaluations of various aspects of their social world. This can sometimes be ambivalent e.g. when we perceive a chocolate as something that is both tasty and unhealthy.
What are the 3 functions of Beliefs and explain them.
- Utilitarian function: making progress towards goals
- existential function: offer meaning and purpose in life, and protect us from fear and mortality
- value expressive function: high self esteem makes us less anxious and defensive when confronted with inevitability of our own death.
Formation and change of attitudes: The mere exposure effect. Who proposed this effect and what does it mean?
- Zajonc (1968)
- being repeatedly exposed to a person or object can cause people to form positive attitudes towards them.
- you may watch a tv programme your friend likes to watch
- Zajonc found that people were more likely to say that familiar nonsense words or characters meant something positive.
- Harmon-Jones and Allen found people were more likely to smile at familiar faces than unfamiliar ones.
Bornstein and D’Agostino (1992) argued that mere exposure to a stimulus is because of what reasons?
- familiar objects are perceived more readily and fluently
2. rather than attributing fluency to the object’s familiarity, people assume they like the objects
True or false: People who recognised the stimuli as having seen before, liked the objects more.
False. They liked it less because they can recall seeing it.
What is the term for a condition where the process more often than not occurs outside the awareness of the learners?
subliminal conditioning
Conditional stimulus repeatedly paired with the unconditional stimulus that already evokes a positive/negative reaction is called-
classical conditioning (pavlov)
Give an example experiment of subliminal conditioning:
- students were exposed to photos of someone doing everyday things.
- Prior to showing these photos, other photos were shown briefly for 13ms and cannot be realised consciously.The photos were highly pleasant or unpleasant.
- Ps who had seen the positive photos thought the person doing whatever stuff appeared to be more positive; he/she felt more positive in general
- funny thing is, the person paired with positive photos reported the person in the photo to be more attractive and have better personality
- This experiment shows that attitude learning can occur at unconscious levels
What would be the effect if participants payed attention to stimuli pairings?
Associative learning happen more strongly;
Evaluative conditioning effects are wiped out when Ps were placed under cognitive load- what does this mean?
Ps did not have the conscious resources free to pay attention to the stimulus they were being exposed to (DeDonder et al.)
Evaluative conditioning is stronger when Ps are instructed to pay attention to the positive/negative pictures.
What is instrumental conditioning?
Being praised for something is a good way to learn. Behaviour praised is reinforced and more likely to be repeated.
What is observational conditioning?
Children may show derogative attitudes about particular ethnic groups but in reality they know nothing about them- the attitude must have been learned by listening or observing.
- participants watch US Tv shows showing negative facial expressions to black vs white; they were influenced by the social bias, reporting more prejudiced attitudes on the implicit association test.
People take on others’ attitudes about groups they do not have any knowledge about. True or false?
True
Show an example of innate/genetic factors influencing attitude.
political conservation also seems to be heritable- Bouchard et al. showed that conservative social attitudes are shared more strongly between monozygotic twins than dizygotic. This study focused on twins who are reared apart at birth, therefore similarities in upbringing is not taken into account.
If we have a positive attitude about one object or person, we tend to form positive attitude about other objects or person that it is positively related to. Psychologists came up with a balancing triad to show this scenario. What are the rules of the balancing triad that indicate balance or unbalanced?
3 positive or 2 negative=balanced
1 negative or 3 negative=unbalanced.
What is the social representation theory?
belief about the world are built up by groups of people through process of social interaction. indigenous groups of people may feel negatively about immigrants that they have no contact with. This theory has been criticised because it shows no evidence of how SR theory is developed and it is too vague and all-encompassing
What are two functions of attitudes?
- utilitarian function, which tells us that attitudes serve to maximize our rewards and minimize harm
- value expression- attitudes serve to communicate social and political beliefs
What are some characteristics and definition of explicit attitude?
- ambivalence rare
- consistency facilitates attitude-behaviour consistency
- information gathering is influenced by confirmation of bias
- affective information about objects influences subsequent interaction with the object
- more on the conscious level
What are some characteristics and definition of implicit attitude?
- more on the unconscious level
- is more common than explicit attitude
- inconsistency between explicit and implicit attitudes may be common
- usually negative implicit attitudes signify bias, directly unfairly towards stigmatised people.
- may be more socially unacceptable than explicit
- more likely to influence our unplanned, spontaneous behaviour
- Dovidio et al. found that it is easier to impact our physical behaviour more strongly in social bias and it affects our negative body language during interactions across social boundaries.
- heightened when consuming alcohol
- More able to influence behaviour when we have no control over the cognitive process
Describe the IAT test
IAT is a test that measures implicit attitudes, usually about a person’s social bias towards certain groups of people. Two groups of images are shown on the screen, for example, a black vs a white individual. The participant is supposed to press two keys, one negative and one positive. For example, “bad “ and “good”. This will subliminally measured therefore the timing is so fast that the participant will not be consciously recognising his/her reactions. But the reaction time will be recorded. The result will show attitudes associated with mental networks and that association is stronger if an attitude exists and when it does not. For example, if the participant has negative bias towards black people, then he or she will have a fast reaction time at which the “bad” button is pressed. People will be able to link concepts that are related than those not more quickly. In general, “me” or “good” should be faster than “them” or “bad”.
What are some criticisms of the IAT?
- Some IAT do not correlate with each other
- people can fake it in order to avoid being judged by the experimenter
- difficult to interpret scores
implicit attitudes formed more slowly. True or false?
False. it is formed more quickly
What is the Associative Propositional Evaluation Model?
- you may implicitly like someone because they look like someone you know. However, you don’t necessarily think that they are nice or attractive. You will have to know more about them.
Therefore this model explains implicit attitudes may be an associative process triggered by stimulus or memory. Explicit may be a propositional process akin to beliefs and knowledge or conclusions, defined as validation of information that is implied by activated associations.
We know that Attitude is a factor influencing behaviour. What are the other factors?
- Situation. So it all depends on the situation, duh.
- Values and ideology e.g. environmentally friendly behaviour
- Habits and individual differences e.g. a person’s consistency is answering questions about their personality is more likely to be higher in their behaviours on relevant dimensions.
