Chapter 4

Question 1

What are attitudes?

Answer 1

People’s evaluations of aspects of the social world.

Question 2

What is an attitude object?

Answer 2

The thing an attitude is about.

Question 3

What are ambivalent attitudes?

Answer 3

Attitudes that are mixed, being both positive and negative.

Question 4

What are values?

Answer 4

Enduring beliefs about important aspects of life that go beyond specific situations.

Question 5

What are the 10 universal values?

Answer 5

Self-direction, universalism, benevolence, conformity, tradition, security, power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation.

Question 6

What are ideologies?

Answer 6

Interrelated and widely shared sets of beliefs that typically relate to social or political contexts.

Question 7

What is the tripartite model of attitudes?

Answer 7

A model of the structure of attitudes which assumed that attitudes have three components: cognitive, affective (emotional) and behavioural.

Question 8

What is attitude complexity?

Answer 8

The number of dimensions along which an attitude object is evaluated.

Question 9

What is attitude function?

Answer 9

The study of why people have attitudes.

Question 10

What is a schema?

Answer 10

A cognitive structure that represents information about a concept, its attributes and its relationship to other concepts.

Question 11

What are the functions of attitudes?

Answer 11

Knowledge, utilitarianism, value expression, ego defense.

Question 12

What is the mere exposure effect?

Answer 12

The more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more we tend to like it.

Question 13

What is social learning?

Answer 13

People acquire their attitudes (as well as behaviours) often from others.

Question 14

What is subliminal conditioning?

Answer 14

Classical conditioning that occurs outside the learner’s conscious awareness.

Question 15

What is observational learning?

Answer 15

Individuals’ attitudes (and behaviours) are influenced by observing others.

Question 16

What is attitude consistency?

Answer 16

People prefer to have harmonious, consistent thoughts and feelings towards the people and objects in their lives.

Question 17

Describe the attitude triad.

Answer 17

The relationship between yourself, a person, and an attitude. If both of you agree on the attitude, the triad is balanced; if one of you disagrees about the attitude, the triad is unbalanced.

Question 18

What is the social representation theory?

Answer 18

Theory that beliefs about the social world are formed through processes of social interaction.

Question 19

What is the difference between implicit and explicit attitudes?

Answer 19

Implicit attitudes are not expressed freely (may sometimes even not be known to the person).

Question 20

What is an attitude scale?

Answer 20

A series of questions designed to gauge a person’s attitudes on a topic.

Question 21

Name indirect measures of attitudes.

Answer 21

Bogus pipeline procedure, EMG, EEG, fMRI, implicit association tests.

Question 22

What is an implicit association test?

Answer 22

Reaction time test that measures the strengths of automatic associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory.

Question 23

What is the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model?

Answer 23

Model asserting that implicit and explicit attitudes are the behavioural outcomes of separate mental processes.

Question 24

What defines attitude strength?

Answer 24

Accessibility, intensity, knowledge about the attitude object.

Question 25

What is the theory of planned behaviour?

Answer 25

Theory concerning how attitudes predict behaviour. It argues that several factors, including subjective norms, attitudes towards the behaviour and perceived behavioural control, determine behavioural intentions concerning the behaviour and, in turn, intentions strongly determine whether the behaviour is performed.

Question 26

Theory of reasoned action

Answer 26

Predecessor to the theory of panned behaviour. It did not take perceived behavioural control into account as a predictor of intentions.

Question 27

What is cognitive dissonance?

Answer 27

An unpleasant psychological state that occurs when people notice that their attitudes and behaviours (or their attitudes) are inconsistent with each other.

Question 28

What conditions are necessary for people to recognize dissonance?

Answer 28

Realize that the inconsistency has negative consequences; take responsibility for the action; experience physiological arousal; attribute the physiological arousal to the action itself.

Question 29

What is self-affirmation?

Answer 29

Restoring positive self-views when faced with cognitive dissonance.

Question 30

What is post-decisional dissonance?

Answer 30

When you make a choice between two or more options, the fact that you have chosen one is dissonant with the fact that the other options also had appealing features.

Question 31

What is hypocrisy?

Answer 31

Publicly supporting an attitude or behaviour and yet behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the attitude or behaviour.

Question 32

What is embodied social cognition?

Answer 32

An area of study where research shows broadly that bodily states influence attitudes, social perception and emotion.

Question 33

What is proprioception?

Answer 33

The perception of the body’s position and movement.

Question 34

What are emotions?

Answer 34

Brief, specific psychological and physical responses to an object or event.

Question 35

What is the feelings-as-information perspective?

Answer 35

Theory proposing that people often rely on their feelings–often gut instincts–to guide important social judgements.