attitudes and social cognition Flashcards
An attitude is an
association between an attitude object (thing or event) and an evaluation of it (positive or negative)
There are three theories regarding the number of components of an attitude:
(i) one-component model: attitudes are comprised only of affect (positive or negative emotional evaluations), (ii) two-component model: attitudes are comprised of affect and cognition (beliefs associated with the attitude object), and (iii) three-component model: attitudes are comprised of affect, cognition and behaviour (the observable output of an attitude)
The two component theory of attitudes (affect and cognition) is superior to the three component theory (affect, cognition and behaviour)because
behaviours that are supposed to correspond to attitudes are not always observable or consistent and thus are sufficiently distinct from attitudes; thus, attitudes are thoughts and feelings about attitude objects with which observable behaviours may be associated and from which attitudes can be inferred
There are five dimensions of attitudes:
(i) attitude strength, (ii) extent of conscious awareness, (iii) cognitive complexity, (iv) emotional ambivalence, and (v) coherence
Attitude strength refers to the
durability (i.e. persists over time and is resistant to change) and impact (i.e. is more likely to affect our behaviors and influence the way we think and feel) of an attitude
Attitude strength is that it is affected by attitude importance (i.e. the personal relevance and significance of an attitude to an individual) and attitude accessibility (i.e. the ease with which we remember our attitudes);
the greater the attitude importance and attitude accessibility, the greater the attitude strength
Attitude importance and attitude accessibility are correlated;
we tend to remember attitudes that are more meaningful to us and we attitudes tend to become more meaningful to us when we can remember them
Implicit attitudes refer to
attitudes that occur automatically and are outside of conscious awareness and control; explicit attitudes refer to attitudes within our conscious awareness and control
Cognitive complexity refers to
how intricate or simple the thoughts/beliefs underlying the attitude are
Emotional ambivalence refers to
the degree to which an attitude object is associated with conflicting feelings/emotions; this indicates is that positive and negative emotional evaluations are independent of one another
Coherence refers to
the extent to which an attitude is internally consistent with itself; that is, the thoughts and feelings have a similar (and not opposite) valence
Attitudes match our behaviours when:
(i) the attitude and behaviour are specific, (ii) the behaviour being reinforced matches our attitude, (iii) important others share our attitude, (iv) attitudes are explicit, (v) attitudes are strong and (vi) attitudes are acquired though personal (or direct) experience
One way attitudes can be changed is through
persuasion
Persuasion refers to
deliberate efforts to change another person’s attitude
The classic model argues
that persuasion depends on the characteristics of a number of components – the source, message, channel, context, and receiver
Sources that appear more credible (expert and trustworthy), attractive, likeable, powerful and similar to the recipient of the message
are more persuasive
Messages that present only one side of an argument are
less persuasive to a person ready and willing to hear both sides
Moderate levels of fear are most effective in inducing attitude change because
too much fear causes people to focus on their anxiety instead of the content of the message and too little fear does not induce the person to pay sufficient attention to the message
The channel refers to the
means by which a message is sent (e.g. words, images, verbal/non-verbal communication, TV, radio, in person, email, texting, etc.); the effectiveness of the channel depends on the situation
Pleasant backgrounds and competing messages contextualise
the effectiveness of persuasion
Qualities or characteristics of the person receiving the message
influence whether they will be persuaded
A limitation of the classic model is that
although it describes what factors make persuasion more likely, it does not explain how these how factors make persuasion more likely; this limitation is addressed by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981)
According to the ELM, there are two routes through which people can be persuaded:
(i) central and (ii) peripheral
In the central route, the recipient of the message is induced to think carefully about the message and weigh up arguments for and against the message;
generally, people who process a message centrally are highly involved with the issue, have a higher need for cognition, and are attentive to the quality of the arguments
In the peripheral route, the recipient of the message is induced not to think carefully about the quality of the arguments for and against the message and appeals are made to their (less rational and thoughtful) emotions instead of cognitively engaging them;
peripheral qualities include for example the sheer number of arguments for a message or the attractiveness of the source
According to the ELM, the likelihood people will elaborate on (or think about) a message depends on
(i) their motivation (to be convinced by logic and not emotion) and (ii) whether they have the time to think deeply and logically about an issue; if people want to think deeply about an issue (and assuming they have the time do so), then appeals to our central processing will be more persuasive than appeals to our peripheral processing
Peripheral (or implicit) processing is a highly effective form of persuasion because it capitalises on the fact that we are time-poor; two common ways in which implicit or peripheral processing occur are
classical conditioning and repetition (repetition increases familiarity and thus liking, it strengthens the association between two pieces of information and it increases the perceived credibility of a message)
Social cognition refers to the process by which we make sense of ourselves, other people, social interactions and relationships; four ways in which social cognition occur include:
(i) schemas, (ii) attribution theory, (iii) cognitive biases and (iv) the self
Schemas refer to
patterns of thought that develop from, and organise, our experiences; we form schemas on many things such as first impressions (i.e. initial schemas), ourselves (i.e. self-schemas), other individuals (e.g. extroverts), groups of people (e.g. Asians, women), situations (e.g. how to behave during a lecture), roles (e.g. how a teacher should act) and relationships (e.g. how a mother should act)
Schemas are stored in
memory and guide information processing; specifically we tend to pay more attention to, encode (or think about) more deeply, and have better retrieval for information that is consistent with our schemas and this tendency reflects the ‘confirmation bias’ (the tendency to seek out information that confirms rather than information that disconfirms our hypotheses)
Schemas are
essential for allowing us to make predictions about the future and save limited cognitive and other resources such as attention and time; that is, they are ‘cognitively efficient’
The problem with schemas being quick and dirty ways of thinking about the world, is
that we may think we know enough about something to get by and so we stop incorporating new information; instead, we rely on the information in our schema which becomes stereotypic and this can have significantly detrimental consequences for people (e.g. racial stereotypes can lead to prejudice and discrimination)
Attribution refers to the
process of inferring the causes for our own or other people’s mental states and behaviours
According to Kelley’s (1973) three factor model of attribution, people rely on three types of information
(consensus, consistency and distinctiveness) when attributing the cause of a behaviour to either external (situational) or internal (personal) factors
Consensus refers to the
way most people have responded to a situation (if consensus is high, we attribute the behaviour to external factors);;
consistency refers to the
extent to which a person responds to similar stimulus in the same way at different points in time (if consistency is high, we attribute behaviour to internal factors)
distinctiveness refers to the
extent to which a person responds to different (if distinctiveness is high, we attribute behaviour to external stimuli in different ways factors)
Even though behaviour is usually a combination of both internal and external factors (reflecting multiple causes), humans have a strong desire to attribute behaviour to either internal or external factors; to achieve this goal, people can either:
(i) discount factors (i.e. down-play the role of internal factors if they are aware of other situational factors that might be contributing to their behaviour, or (ii) augment factors (i.e. increase attribution to internal factors despite knowledge of the situation)
Attributional style refers to
a person’s habitual manner of assigning causes to either internal or external factors; e.g. optimistic attributional style marked by the habit of assigning positive events to internal factors and pessimistic attributional style marked by the habit of assigning positive events to external factors
The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is
a type of cognitive bias in which people have a tendency to attribute other people’s behaviour to their personality (internal) rather than the situation (external) and vice versa (i.e. the tendency to attribute our own behaviour to the situation (external) rather than our personality (internal));
one main reason that accounts for the FAE is that we have a tendency to discount external factors for other people because we are not as aware of them
Research has shown that people from collectivist cultures demonstrate the FAE less than people from individualistic cultures because
in collectivist cultures, less attention is paid to the behaviour of individuals (and more is paid to the family group); this cross-cultural difference suggests that this cognitive bias may not be so fundamental to human nature (thus, it is also referred to as the correspondence bias)
The self-serving bias is
another type of cognitive bias and occurs when people tend to see themselves more positively than other people see them
This bias can take many forms, for example:
(i) most people rate themselves as ‘above average’ (which is not statistically possible), (ii) people are more likely to recall positive rather than negative information about themselves, (iii) people are more likely to see their talents (but not their deficiencies) as striking and unusual , (iv) people attribute greater responsibility to themselves for a group product than other people in the group do, (v) people assume they are less driven by self interest than those around them, and (vi) people take credit for their successes and attribute failure to external factors
The self serving bias is a form of positive illusion that
helps maintain self esteem and thus is normal, but it is heightened in people with narcissism
The self is defined as
the person, including their mental processes, body and personality characteristics
The self-concept (i.e. the way we see ourselves) is defined as
the self-schema (i.e. a schema about the self that guides the way we think and remember information that’s relevant to ourselves) in the cognitive perspective and self-representation (i.e. mental models of the self) in the psychodynamic perspective
A key feature of the psychodynamic perspective is that
some parts of our self representation may be unconscious or implicit; e.g. people with narcissism implicitly have low self esteem, but explicitly have grandiose self esteem
Self-esteem refers to
an individuals’ usual evaluation of themselves reflecting how much they like and respect themselves; (i) self esteem is relatively stable, despite some fluctuations, (ii) the desire to maintain a positive sense of self is a very strong motivator of human behaviour, despite our need for an accurate and objective view of ourselves and (iii) self esteem can be domain-specific, e.g. morality, appearance, competence
Some of the ways that we typically use to increase self esteem include:
(i) the use of positive illusions such as the self serving bias, (ii) self enhancing domains in which we are typically successful, (iii) using downward social comparison so that we appear relatively better, (iv) self-handicapping; setting ourselves up for failure so that we can control the attributions we later make to the outcome and thus preserve self esteem, and (v) basking in reflected glory; announcing affiliation with a group that is successful and denouncing affiliation with a group that is not successful
