Attitudes and Social Cognition Flashcards
Attitude
• Attitude: Is an association between an act or object and evaluation
Opinion
• Opinion: unemotional state about an object
Belief
• Belief: Acceptance of a set of circumstances and so stronger than attitudes
Cognitive dissonance
• Cognitive dissonance: Occurs when a person experiences a discrepancy between an attitude and a behaviour or between an attitude and a new piece of information
Examples of ceb:
Cognitive (think): I’ll probably act like an idiot if I drink too much. Emotional (feel): I hate the feeling of being out of control when I drink. Behavioural (do): Decreased likelihood of binge drinking
Attitudes importance
Personal relevance and significance of an attitude for a particular person
Attitudes Strength
• Attitudes strength: The durability and impact of an attitude (has the same attitude persisted over time? Is it resistant to change?)
Attitudes Accessibility
• Attitudes Accessibility: Ease with which an attitude comes to mind
Attitudes implicitness
• Attitudes implicitness: Degree to which we are aware of our attitudes. Attitudes so implicit that they regulate behaviour unconsciously/automatically
Complexity
• Complexity: Degree of reasoning that forms an attitude. Intricacy of thoughts about different attitudes is their cognitive complexity
Attitudinal Ambivalence
• Attitudinal Ambivalence: The extent to which a given attitude object is associated with conflicting evaluative responses
Coherence
• Coherence: Extent to which an attitude (particularly cognitive and evaluative) is internally consistence. Do we like things that we believe have positive consequences for us?
Persuasion
• Persuasion: People often have a vested interest in changing others attitudes, whether they are selling products, running for political office or trying to convince a lover to reconcile one more time. Persuasion refers to the deliberate efforts to change an attitude.
Social Cognition Schemas
• Social cognition schemas:
o Help organise and make sense of the world and help fill in the gaps of our knowledge
o Information consistent with our schemas more likely to be remembered
o Our information processing can be biased
o Resistant to change
Attribution
The process of inferring the cause of one’s own and others mental states and behaviours. Process is deciding if behaviour is internally or externally caused. E.g. Internal stable: She is not very good at the exam. Internal unstable: She gets way to anxious when she takes exams. External stable: The exam was really too hard. External unstable: It was bad luck that it wasn’t the content that I studied
