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.
define cognitive dissonance
an unpleasant psychological state that people notice that their attitudes and behaviour are inconsistent with each other. e.g. smoking and knowing it causes cancer
Who did a study on cognitive dissonance?
Festinger and Carlsmith
Describe a cognitive dissonance study conducted by Festinger:
Group of Ps asked to do a very boring task.
They were then told to tell another group of people that it is a fun and interesting task. “lying” here is the cognitive dissonance.
A group of these Ps were paid $1 to do it. Cognitive dissonance was making them so uncomfortable that they convinced themselves that the task was actually interesting! They changed their attitude to match their behaviour to make them “in sync”.
Another group of Ps were paid $20. This higher amount of money was perceived as a reward of lying, therefore it was less necessary to change attitude.
Attitudes need to both strong and non accessible to influence a person’s behaviour. true or false?
FALSE
The attitude needs to ACCESSIBLE
In what situation would attitude predict behaviour directly?
When the there is no serious consequences of inaccuracy
When the behaviour associated with an attitude is more complex and effortful, aka not habitual, what should one do to amplify that behaviour?
- The habit must be linked to a specific behavioural intention e.g. “I want to lose weight” vs “I intend to cut back my calorie intake by 300 calories”
- The behavioural intention is linked to a simple concrete plan of action e.g. “counting calories everyday and eating only fruit and vegetables for 5 or 6 meals a day”
Reminders increase accessibility of attitude-behavioural consistency. Describe an example that illustrates this idea:
Synder and Swann(1976)
- Male Ps made sexual discrimination judgments in court, mainly targeted at women
- attitude was made positive when attitudes towards positive action were made more salient
4 ways in which attitudes can directly affect behaviour: Accessibility, habit linked to an intention and plan, reminders, and what is the last one?
AWARENESS; this increases attitude accessibility.
- Diener and Wallbom (1976)
- people were asked to cheat during anagram test\
- they were divided into two groups
- one group had a mirror in front of them and the other did not.
- the mirror group was more conscious about their behaviour as they could see themselves. the cheated less.
- the other group cheated more.
how can accessibility of attitude be increased?
- practice
- come into mind to affect behaviour
- awareness
When is dissonance NOT produced by inconsistent behaviour?
- when the inconsistent behaviour does not affect core values
- actions of low costs
- actions that are coerced- forced behaviour only reinforce own beliefs
- actions that are easily justified-payment
When does dissonance NOT result in attitude change?
When dissonance can be attributed to something other than then action (Cooper et.al.)
- Ps were asked to write about something contradicting their beliefs
- they were given tranquilliser to relax, amphetamines to tense, or placebo with no effects.
- the relaxed group had more attitude change
- Therefore, the more tense a person is, the less likely the attitude is going to change.
Define Embodied social cognition:
people’s attitudes are influenced by their physical actions
Self Perception Theory proposed by Bem 1972, asserts that people look at their own behaviours and infer their attitudes from them. Give an example experiment of social perception theory:
Ps were asked to write counter-attitudinal essays. They reported they have less control over what they believe or learn. They inferred their attitude not from what they thought, but from what they have written.
Wells and Patty (1980) did an experiment on social perception theory. What is the experiment?
They asked people to nod or shake their heads while listening to persuasive messages about university-related topic.
Those who nod their heads showed more agreement.
Who conducted the Funny Cartoon experiment?
Strack, Martin and Stepper (1988)
Who conducted the Fist vs Notion of Power experiment?
Schubert (2004)
Mimicry and imitation is also a form of embodiment. Explain this:
Imitating what someone else is doing, e.g. crossing arms, is able to increase liking from them. This facilitate cooperation and empathy among people who interact. In general it is a positive interaction sign. This is due to our mirror neurons!!
Feedback from facial mimicry helps people process emotional expressions, helpful in social interactions. Describe the study:
- sensitivity to others’ facial expressions can cause us to mimic their emotional responses
- when people smell disgusting things, the area in the brain called insula activates; also happens when they are watching other people display disgusted expressions.
- Another study asked confederate to fake an injury and then grimace in pain. Participants also grimaced.
What is the emotional consequence of Botox Treatment?
They have reduced ability to read sentences that referred to anger and sadness. They are worse in detecting emotions of others because they themselves do not feel that kind of emotion as they are unable to use those facial muscles.
