Attitudes & Social Cognition Flashcards
Social psychology
study human social behaviour, identity regularities in social behaviour, and various aspects of interactions
Attitudes
psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour
- three components: affect, behavioural dispositions, cognition
- vary in: valence, strength, complexity and accessibility
Attitude change - yale model
- source/communicator (credibility, similarity, attractiveness)
- recipient/audience (intelligence, attitude strengths)
- message
- channel
Fear as attitude change?
Protection motivation theory = fear works best if coupled with information on how to effectively respond
Inverted U-curve = Fear has to be optimal to be most effective
(backfires if extreme)
Elaboration likelihood model
Central route =
- high elaboration of message content and careful processing
- attitude change from quality of arguments
- when argument is important, we have time and cognitive capacity to think about the issue
Peripheral route =
- little or no elaboration, no careful processing
- attitude change based on persuasive cues
- when it is not important to us, we are distracted and have limited time to think
Cognitive dissonance
- inconsistency between cognitions and behaviours → aversive state = dissonance
seek to reduce = changing cognitions/behaviours, reduce importance of it, adding additional cognition/behaviour
Social cognition
thinking about other people, interpersonal relations and social institutions
Schemas
- cognitive structures that represent knowledge about a concept. based on direct and indirect experience
- self-schema, person, role, social group (stereotypes) and event/script schemas
Impression formation and biases
when observing other people, interpreting info, draw inferences and develop mental representation of them, not objective or always accurate
- order effects
- valence effects
- stereotypes
Order effect bias of impression formation
Primacy = first info influence impression (strong and common) Recency = info presented last has more impact than earlier info (when distracted or little motivation to attend)
Valence effects bias of impression formation
Valence effects
positive impressions= formed in absence of any negative info, halo effect, and easily changed when negative info presented
negative impressions = formed when any sign of negative info, difficult to change even when positive info presented later (we are biased towards negativity)
Heuristics
- cognitive shortcuts that provide adequately accurate inferences, most of the time, less time consuming, quick, less effortful and quick solutions that serve us well most of the time
- Representativeness heuristics = judging likelihood based on how much it resembles schema/prototype
- Availability heuristics = judging likelihood based on how quickly or easily something comes to mind
Attribution
infer the causes of their own and others behaviour, social perception motivated by predicting and controlling the environment
- Internal, dispositional factors = individual personality
- External, situational factors = environment, context
Kelley’s Covariation Model
principle: attribute behaviour to which it covaries most closely over time
Consistency = same across time (high) Distinctiveness = same towards other targets as with this target (=low) consensus = if others behave same way towards target as this person (=high)
Attribution errors
Fundamental attribution error = other’s behaviour = internal, personality
Actor-observer bias = own behaviour = external, environment
Self-serving bias = success = stable, internal + failures = temporary, external
- self-presentation and enhance self-esteem
