attitudes behaviours and social

Question 1

what is the first point to when do attitudes predict behaviour?

Answer 1

when attitude is strong (pos or neg)
strength
- extreme
-important and relevant (if like
animals will engage in activities
that support them)
- based on direct experience with
att object

Question 2

what is the 2nd point to when do attitudes predict behaviour?

Answer 2

when behaviour is controllable
eg. hobby - make sense to play basketball when you like it and find it enjoyable

Question 3

what is the 3rd point to when do attitudes predict behaviour?

Answer 3

when behaviour is not controllable

Question 4

what are the 4 ways behaviour is not controllable?

Answer 4

1. external threat - teen has neg att towards school but goes due to consequences if dont
2. lack of alternatives - engage in something you don’t like
3. lack of time - cant do things cause no time
4. bio need or addiction

Question 5

what is the 4th point to when do attitudes predict behaviour?

Answer 5

when measure match the principle of compatibility
- specific att measures with predict specific behaviours (vice versa)

eg. pos att towards healthy lifestyle
- predict high frequency of working out at gym
- ask how favourable are you towards working out at the gym before deciding - if 0 times - not favourable

Question 6

what is the broad point?

Answer 6

what ppl think of attitudes about diff classes of people, places, things etc. are often expressions of attitudes of a prototypical example of given category

• when person doesn’t fit prototype - behaviour wont reflect stated attitude

Question 7

what is the 5th point to when do attitudes predict behaviour?

Answer 7

when attitudes are implicit (automatic evaluative response to target)

1. consistent with explicit attitudes
2. cant consciously report them

Question 8

what is the implicit associations task study/example?

Answer 8

• pairing target from social category (ethnic group, gender, age) with series of positive words and negative words and computer measures how fast people can make these categorizations
  • sample - pair words tg - young face paired with positive connotation and old face paired with neg word
    
    • then switch around

Question 9

what were the results of this test?

Answer 9

• if faster to pair young faces with good and old faces with bad - indicative of negative implicit feeling towards older people
  • suggestive of implicit prejudice towards older people
  • predict spontaneous behaviour that is harder to control (facial expressions)

Question 10

what were the criticisms of this test?

Answer 10

• not clear whether it measures prejudice vs knowledge of cultural stereotypes
• scores can vary from one time to the next

Question 11

inconsistency between a persons thoughts, sentiments and actions create an averse emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency

Answer 11

cognitive dissonance

Question 12

what does CD entail

Answer 12

• inconsistency among cognitions results in aversive emotional state
  -aversive arousal motivates attempts to eliminate it
• engage in actions that can reduce CD or do something that would rationalize their inconsistent behaviour

Question 13

what was the study festinger conducted to show CD?

Answer 13

• festinger and grad students infiltrated group who believed world was coming to and end
• team of researchers observed actions of cult members
  
  • belief: world was gonna end
  • fact: world didn’t end
  • produced major CD
• reduced by trying to convince outsiders that their prayers had saved the world(DELULU)

Question 14

what are the 3 cognitions for reducing dissonance for the example of smoking?

Answer 14

• says smokes a lot and enjoys it but also knows its unhealthy (these two thoughts simultaneously produces CD)

options for reducing dissonance (caused by smoking)
1. change behaviour (quit)
2. add consonant cognitions (smoking keeps my weight down - justifications)
3. downplay the importance of the dissonant cognition
- eg. might die of cancer in late ages so don’t care if its unhealthy

Question 15

when does dissonance reduction happen? diff between before and after?

Answer 15

• happens only when decision has already been made and cant be undone
  
  • if we see faults in a decision we think is the best - rationalize before hand to minimize dissonance
• rationalization happens before hand too
  
  • when have preference - distort info to support preference (confirmation bias)

Question 16

what is induced compliance?

Answer 16

compelling ppl to behave in manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs in order to elicit dissonance and change their original attitudes or behaviours

• illusion that people have freely performed a counter attitudinal behaviour
  
  • eg. write an essay in favour of something you are against

Question 17

what happened in festinger and carlsmith?

Answer 17

• control condition - performed boring task by turing wooden knobs for a long time (gave low rating about enjoyability)
  
  • ps then needed to tell next ps that it was enjoyable
• IV - everyone told the lie to next ps
  
  • offered either 1 or 20 dollars
• given questionnaire asked to rate the enjoyablility of task - depends on how much you were paid

Question 18

what were the results?

Answer 18

• dissonance for those only paid $1 - words inconsistent with beliefs and wasn’t enough to justify
  
  • reduce dissonance - rationalize by changing attitude about behaviour
  • evaluated task more favourably
• those paid $20 - no rationalization because the reward was bigger that the consequence of the lie

Question 19

educe dissonance by justifying the time, effort and money spent to something that turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing

eg. its really not that bad”

Answer 19

effort justification

Question 20

what happened in aronson and mills?

Answer 20

• join group that discussed sexual issues - told not every had to pass a test
  
  • regualar initiation - list of inoccuous words
  • mild initiation- read out loud list of embarrassing words such as prostitute, petting and virgin
  • severe initiation - read aloud obscene words and smutty novel passage
• told they passed test and everyone joined
• ps soon learned that group was very boring and just listened to discussion of sex life of invertebraes -

Question 21

what were the results?

Answer 21

• produce dissonance for those who were in the severe condition
  
  • group disscussion was boring and had to twist their thinking into thinking it wasn’t boring
  • complete questionnaire about enjoyment - severe group rated more favourably due to the dissonance
    
    • example: hazing and team bonding rituals

Question 22

what does it mean when ppl say “commitments can grow legs even if it is for a lost cause?”

Answer 22

-build of layers of rationalizations for doing something
-diff to admit we were wrong and just move on

eg. person stays in bad relationship and say that put in so much effort to make it work and if i don’t stay i have wasted time

Question 23

what is rationalizing decisions in terms if dissonance induction?

Answer 23

• allow people to chose one of two equally desirable alternatives
  
  • eg choosing to live in an apartment A (bigger and nicer) or apt. B closer to school and lower rent
• rejected alt. has some desirable features and chosen alt. has some undesirable features ~ inconsistency makes dissonance

Question 24

what happened in. brehm?

Answer 24

• women rated consumer products and ask to rate desirability and got to choose one of the products to take home (can be easier or harder)2 conditions
  - 2 similarly rated products(difficult and produced dissonance)
• 2 dissimilarly products - easy
  • women rated all of the products again
    
    • rated chosen item higher than before and rated not chosen item lower than before

Question 25

what happened Westen et al?

Answer 25

• using Fmri found that prefrontal cortex is active and affected when ps experiencing dissonance
  
  • area involved in decision making and reasoning
  • when dissonance reduced - pleasure circuits are activated

Question 26

“arouse dissonance by having people publicly promote a socially desirable behaviour then reminding them they haven’t always acted in line with their beliefs towards this socially desirable behaviour”

Answer 26

hypocrisy paradigm

Question 27

what happened in stone et al?

Answer 27

• having subjects publicly advocate the importance of safe sex and then making the hs students mindful of their own past failures to use condoms
  
  • hypocrisy induction motivate subjects to reduce dissonance by purchasing condoms at the end
  • hypocrisy condition - bought more condoms

Question 28

what happened in peterson et al?

Answer 28

does self esteem influence how we respond to the hypocrisy paradigm?

regular smokers
- one study (HP) - delivered speech on dangers of smoking (idea was to stop smoking)
- second study (HP) - wrote public passage about importance of healthy lifestyle (improve healthy behaviours)

• self esteem scores in both positively related intentions to change behaviour in hyp condition but not control condition

Question 29

what are the 4 main factors of personal dissonance?

Answer 29

• behaviour freely chosen
• behaviour wasn’t justified
• behaviour had negative consequences
• negative consequences were foreseeable