Chapter 4: Behaviour and Attitudes Flashcards
How do you define an attitude?
- A favourable or unfavourable evaluative reaction toward something or someone, exhibited in one’s beliefs, feelings, or intended behaviour
T/F: Attitudes are a great predictor of behaviour.
- FALSE
What is Ajzen and Fishbein’s theory of planned behaviour?
- They showed that one’s a) attitudes, b) perceived social norms, and c) feelings of control influence behaviour intentions
- Control refers to how easy or difficult it is to perform the task
- Behaviour intentions do sometimes correlate with which behaviours are performed
When do attitudes predict behaviour?
1) When we minimize other influences on our attitude statements and or behaviour
2) When the attitude is specifically relevant to the observed behaviour
3) When attitudes are potent (strong presence in one’s mind)
What’s impression management?
- A form of self-presentation
- Being concerned with making a good impression to: gain social and material rewards, to feel better about ourselves, or to become more secure in our social identities
Why do we perform impression management?
- Want to appear consistent (i.e., appear as who we think we are)
- We express attitudes that match our actions
- Seen very often in job interviews
- There is honest IM and deceptive IM
What’s cognitive dissonance?
- A form of self-justification
- We feel tension when we are aware that we have two thoughts that are consistent or incompatible
- Also occurs when our behaviour is inconsistent with our attitudes
- Result: We have to adjust our thinking
- We don’t like holding two competing thoughts in our head
How to people evade cognitive dissonance?
Via selective exposure:
- People prefer to expose themselves with information that agrees with their point of view
- Connects with the “confirmation bias”
What does dissonance theory state?
- Predicts that when our actions are not fully explained by external rewards or coercion, we will experience dissonance, which we can reduce by believing in what we have done
Which experiment best describes dissonance theory?
- Telling the confederate “how much I enjoyed the experiment” study
- Participants who were only paid one dollar to do the boring task believed it was quite interesting because they didn’t have sufficient justification to say it wasn’t (i.e., they were only paid a dollar)
- These participants experienced much higher dissonance compared to those who were paid $20
Under which circumstances do we experience dissonance after decisions?
- When we must choose between two equally attractive (or equally unattractive) alternatives
- The undesirable features of the chosen alternative and the desirable features of the rejected alternative remain
- People will shift their attitude to the option they ended up choosing to avoid dissonance
What does self-perception theory state?
- Daryl Ben (1972)
- Assume we make similar inferences when we observe our own behaviour
- When are attitudes are weak and ambiguous, we are in the position of someone who observes us from the outside (more concerned about what those around us are thinking about us)
What are intrinsic motivations?
- When people do something they enjoy, without reward or coercion, they attribute their behaviour to their love of the activity
How do external rewards undermine intrinsic motivation?
- They lead people to attribute their behaviour to the incentive
What does self-perception theory fail to mention about dissonance?
- Self-perception theory says nothing about tension being aroused when our actions and attitudes are not in harmony
Which experiment demonstrated that dissonance theory is more applicable than self-perception theory?
- Zanna and Cooper (1974) pill experiment
- All students asked to write essay they didn’t agree with, although one group had a perceived high choice to write the essay
- Three groups: control (no pill effect), arousal pill, and relaxation pill)
- Results: Students who took the arousal pill had no change in attitudes because they had no arousal caused by the cognitive dissonance
- Students who had a perceived high choice to write the essay and who also took the relaxation pill had a huge amount of attitude change opposed to those who felt they had no choice to write the essay
What’s self-affirmation theory?
- People often experience self-image threats after engaging in an undesirable behaviour, and they compensate for this threat by affirming another aspect of the self
- If you threaten people’s self-concept in one domain and they will compensate either by refocusing or by doing good deeds in some other domains
What is self-reservation theory best at explaining?
- Best explains what happens when the discrepancy between attitudes and behaviour is small
Positive attitudes are stronger than negative attitudes?
- FALSE
- Negative attitudes are much stronger than positive attitudes (much more influential)
What does the Ikea effect describe?
- Describes the impact of DIY labour on perceived value
- Results: Builders were willing to pay more money for their homemade origami’s than by those who got a pre-assembled origami
What’s the Foot-in-the-Door phenomenon?
- The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply with a larger request
- “Low-ball technique” is a variation
- Works even when people are aware of a profit motive
- Takes advantage of the psychological effects of making a commitment
What’s the Door-in-the-Face technique?
- Tendency for people who have declined a large request to agree to a smaller request
- Very effective, especially when the norms of reciprocity is salient
How do roles impact our attitudes?
- When taking on a role, our actions in that role often shape our attitudes
What’s the ABCs of attitudes?
- Affect
- Behaviour tendency
- Cognition
What’s moral hypocrisy?
- A disjuncture between attitudes and actions
What’s the principle of aggregation?
- The effects of an attitude or behaviour become more apparent when we look at a person’s average behaviour rather than at isolated acts
What’s moral disengagement?
- Can help justify cruel behaviour, where we distance ourselves from those we hurt.
- May even start to despise them to justify our actions
When do people from collectivistic cultures display high/low cognitive dissonance?
- Display ess CD when making choices for themselves, but more CD when making choices for others
- This is the opposite for individualistic cultures
What’s the insufficient justification effect?
- The smallest incentive that will get people to do something is usually the most effective in getting them to like the activity
