Social Psychology, 7: Attitudes Flashcards
Attitude
Evaluation of a social object that can include affective, behavioral, and cognitive components. Attitudes across the two levels of processing (automatic and controlled) sometimes differ.
Mere exposure effect
Finding that people find stimuli (even ‘meaningless’ shapes) more attractive when they are familiar - even if the person is not aware of ever having seen the stimulus before (e.g., subliminal presentation).
Classical conditioning and attitudes
Attitudes can be conditioned simply by repeatedly associating a new, unfamiliar object with objects linked to definite attitudes.
Social learning and attitudes
Social learning is modeling, learning by observing others. Many attitudes are obtained by imitation.
Cognitive Dissonance
An unpleasant state of conflict between different attitudes or aspects of an attitude. Motivates a person to resolve the conflict, even in ways that may seem absurd, because of the consistency motive.
Post-decision Dissonance
Tendency for decisions made to generate dissonance (regret) because there is frequently some aspect of another option or outcome that appears more desirable in retrospect.
Marriage ceremonies and dissonance
One rationale for elaborate marriage ceremonies may be that they set people up for dissonance if they later wish to undermine their marriage. This occurs because of the effort justification involved in the wedding leading to increased commitment, and because the social nature of the vows leading to increased guilt or shame for violating them.
What did Richard LaPiere find about attitude-behavior consistency?
He found thatstated attitudes often do not predict behavior well. When traveling with immigrants, almost all establishments stated in advance that they would not serve them, but when he arrived with them, the vast majority did serve them.
Dual Processing and Belief
The automatic system processes claims uncritically, it encodes and stores information as if it all were true. Critical thinking and disbelief appears to require effortful, controlled processing.
“Blaming the victim”
Tendency for blame for trauma to be placed on the victim, often sometimes by the victim themselves. Although this can be quite unfair and harmful, some evidence suggests that when victims do it, it can have therapeutic effects, as it restores a sense of control.
Implicit Association Test
A measure of automatic, sometimes unconscious attitudes. Measures reaction time between a target category and positive/negative word associations.
“Familiarity breeds contempt”
A folk saying that is largely untrue. Familiarity generally promotes more liking for favorable or neutral stimuli. Repeated exposure only promotes dislike or stimuli that are markedly unfavorable at the initial exposure.
Attitude polarization
When people use their controlled system to reflect on attitudes, the tendency is for the attitude to become stronger or more extreme, because we tend to use our effort to self-justify existing beliefs (confirmation bias).
Effort justification
One way in which cognitive dissonance exerts effects on attitudes. When a great deal of effort is expended on something for little or no extrinsic reward, a person often adjusts their intrinsic attitude toward the task to become more favorable in order to reduce the dissonance generated by working hard for “little or nothing.”
Operant conditioning and attitudes
Operant conditionins is the use of reward and punishment to alter behavior. In addition to altering behavior, it can lead to favorable and unfavorable attitudes, although it not always a simple matter of rewards leading to favorable attitudes.
