Attitudes and Social Cognition

Question 1

What is an attitude

Answer 1

An attitude is an association between an act or object and an evaluation.

Question 2

Describe attitude strength, importance, accessibility, and implicit attitudes

Answer 2

Attitude strength refers to the durability and impact of an attitude and behaviour. It is influenced by both attitude importance and attitude access ability or the ease with which an attitude comes to mind. Attitudes can also be either explicit or implicit. Implicit attitudes regulate thoughts and behaviour unconsciously and automatically

Question 3

Describe attitudinal ambivalence and attitudinal coherence

Answer 3

Attitudes vary in the degree of cognitive complexity as well as the extent to which the attitude object is associated with conflicting evaluative responses (attitudinal ambivalence). Attitudinal coherence refers to the extent to which an attitude is internally consistent

Question 4

What are the three components of attitudes

Answer 4

• Affect (emotional evaluation; example, pleasure, joy)
• Behavioural dispositions (approach or avoid)
• Cognition (cognitive evaluation; example, importance, benefits)

Question 5

Explain attitude formation

Answer 5

• Experience/’mere exposure’
• Operant conditioning:
  
  • Rewards vs. Punishment
• Classical conditioning:
  
  • Association
• Modelling and Learning
• Self perception theory - infer our attitudes from our behaviour

Question 6

What is the Yale model

Answer 6

YALE MODEL

• Four Factors
  
  • Source/communicator
  • Recipient/audience
  • Message
  • Channel

Question 7

Explain persuasion

Answer 7

Persuasion refers to deliver efforts to change in attitude. Characteristics of the source, message, channel, Contacts and receiver all affect the effectiveness of persuasive appeals.

Question 8

Explain that to route to persuasion can take

Answer 8

Persuasion can occur through central route, inducing the message recipient to think about the argument, or peripheral route, appealing to less thoughtful processes

Question 9

Explain the elaboration likelihood model

Answer 9

The central route to attitude persuasion is more effective when the person is both motivated and able to think about the arguments where is the proof of rule is more effective than the likelihood of the person will engage in high effort cognitive processing as low

Question 10

Explain cognitive dissonance

Answer 10

Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person experiences a discrepancy between an attitude and behaviour or between an attitude and a new piece of information.

Question 11

Explain self perception theory

Answer 11

According to self perception theory attitudes change in dissonance experiments as people observe their own behaviour

Question 12

Explain social cognition

Answer 12

Social cognition refers to the processes by which people make a sense of themselves other social interactions and relationships. Changing concepts of representation in cognitive psychology are beginning to lead to a similar changes in study of social cognition, such as the increasing use of connectionist models, which he representations as patterns of activation of networks of neurons operating in parallel

Question 13

Explain identity

Answer 13

Identity refers to a sense of who we are and what are values beliefs and experiences and roles are in relation to our personal individual self

Question 14

What is the fundamental attribution error

Answer 14

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute behaviours to people’s personalities into ignore possible situational causes

Question 15

Explain the self-serving bias

Answer 15

The self-serving bias is the tendency to see oneself in a more positive light and deserved. Bryce is in social cognition reflect both cognitive factors and motivational factors

Question 16

Explain schemas

Answer 16

Schemas are cognitive structures that represent knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus. Formed on the basis of past experience. Schemas are like theories

Question 17

List the different types of schemas

Answer 17

Self schema, person schema, role schema, social groups gamers, event schemas/groups

Question 18

Explain impression formation

Answer 18

The process through which people observe other people, interpret information about them, draw inferences, and develop representations of them

Question 19

Explain order effects relating to information formation bias

Answer 19

Primacy, information presented first disproportionately influences impression. Recency, sometimes information presented last has more impact to the earlier information (when distracted)

Question 20

Explain the results of studies testing positive impressions and order effects

Answer 20

Positive presented first resulted in more positive impressions, negative presented first resulted in more negative impressions

Question 21

Explain valance affects

Answer 21

Positive impressions are typically formed in absence of any negative information. Negative impressions formed when there is any sign of negative information

Question 22

Explain stereotypes

Answer 22

We often prejudge others who belong to certain groups

Question 23

Explain heuristics

Answer 23

They are cognitive shortcuts to provide accurate inferences for most of us most of the time. Representative heuristic, judging the likelihood of an event by how much it resembles a prototype. Availability heuristic, judging the likelihood of an event by how quickly or easily instance has come to mind

Question 24

Explain Attribution

Answer 24

The process by which people infer the causes of their own and others behaviour. Attribute behaviour to either; internal (individual personality characteristics) external (environment influences and context).

Question 25

Explain Attribution Kelley’s Covariation Model

Answer 25

We are tribute behaviour to the cause with which it Coveri’s over time. We make Person and target and situation attributions based on three types of info.

• Consistency
• Distinctiveness
• Consensus

Question 26

Explain attribution error

Answer 26

Errors that are often made include correspondence buyers/fundamental attribution error, actor observer bias, self-serving bias