SOCIAL 2 Flashcards
Belief
Enduring knowledge about the object, person, or event; can be true or false given the state of the world.
Attitudes
Semi-enduring feelings that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events. Can be positive, neutral, or negative.
Persuasion
The process of deliberately attempting to change a person’s attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors towards a person, thing, idea, etc.
Three components of successful persuasion:
- Source: the thing which the message is coming from
- Content: the message
- Target: who we are attempting to persuade.
Source monitoring
A process of attempting to remember where and when we learned a particular message or fact.
What is source amnesia? What do we do after?
We don’t remember the source.
(Re)evaluate the message on our own without considering whether the source was good or bad. –> accept or reject good information
Cognitive dissonance
The highly negative feeling we experience when our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors contradict and conflict with each other.
Minimize food waste, still throw away food in the garbage
How do we reduce cognitive dissonance?
- Discount Belief/ Attitude: deciding to not care about a set of beliefs/ attitudes anymore.
- Change belief/ attitude: deciding to drop one of your conflicting beliefs/ attitudes to remove conflict (food waste is not that much of a problem)
- Change future behavior: make a promise to yourself to not act in inconsistent ways in the future.
Behaviors in which we justify our irrational actions and beliefs even after getting evidence against them
People change their evaluation of products they were able and not able to get
Political radicalization: saying the source of dissonance is unreliable or conspiracy.
Dissonance is especially strong if people are first asked to explicitly and publicly state what they believe, and especially when going back to that belief has a negative outcome.
Elaboration Likelihood model
Model of persuasion that argues that people can influence through one of two “routes”:
Systematic route to persuasion
Heuristic route to persuasion
Systematic Route to Persuasion
Persuading somebody through content full of reason, logic, and sound arguments. Usually beliefs
Heuristic Route to Persuasion
Exploits association and social norms we all carry with us. Does not directly give information. Usually targets attitudes/behaviors.
The message target has two characteristics for systematic persuasion to work
- Motivation: Message target must be motivated to listen.
2. Ability: the message target has the ability to think about the message
Common methods for heuristic persuasion
- Appel to emotion: Involves fear or sex - captures our attention automatically and makes us feel drawn towards or against the stimuli presented.
- Expertise: when not motivated to attend to the argument, just agree if the person arguing is an expert.
- Foot in the Door technique: make a small request first, and once the person complies make a bigger one
- Door in the face technique: Huge request first and when the person declines, make a smaller one.
Guru effect
If an expert says something incomprehensible, we are more like to assume that the idea must be very complex, not that the expert isn’t very good at communicating the simple idea to us!
