WS-11

ABC's of attitude

Affective component: this involves a person's feelings / emotions about the attitude object. For example: "I am scared of spiders". I feel positively about my course instructor=PREJUDICE Behavioral (or conative) component: the way the attitude we have influences how we act or behave. For example: "I will avoid spiders and scream if I see one". I signed up for another course with the same instructor =DISCRIMINATION Cognitive component: this involves a person's belief / knowledge about an attitude object. For example: "I believe spiders are dangerous". I believe that my course instructor is effective at helping me learn.=STEREOTYPE

Self-Perception study #2

Another study by Wells & Petty (1980) had students listen to a persuasive message while testing out a new pair of headphones. Some students were asked to hold their head still, some were asked to slowly tip their head up and down, and some were told to slowly turn their head side to side. Those who tipped their head up and down were more persuaded by the message, presumably because they perceived themselves to be in agreement based on nodding 'yes' while listening to the message. While self-perception theory cannot account for all of the important findings in attitude research, it is clear that our attitudes can be strongly influenced by our own behavior even if we are not fully aware of how (or why) we are behaving.

Structure of Attitudes

Attitudes structure can be described in terms of three components. Affective component: this involves a person's feelings / emotions about the attitude object. For example: "I am scared of spiders". Behavioral (or conative) component: the way the attitude we have influences how we act or behave. For example: "I will avoid spiders and scream if I see one". Cognitive component: this involves a person's belief / knowledge about an attitude object. For example: "I believe spiders are dangerous".

Attribution and Biases

Attribution is the processes of assigning a cause to an event. We have two basic options. we can explain a behavior as evidence of a disposition (the internal, stable characteristics of the person) or having been caused by the situation (something external, beyond the person's control).

Conceptually speaking, the concept of implicit attitudes is most closely related with

Freud's "id"

Categorize each of the following attribution as confirmation bias.

I just do not think that I am good at math, and the fact that I failed my first exam means that no matter what I do or who tries to help me, I'm going to keep failing. My friend is normally a thoughtful person, so the fact that she is late means that something must have happened beyond her control.

Balanced and Unbalanced example

Jim likes Jane, Jim likes skiing, Jane likes skiing. Jim likes Jane, Jim does not like skiing, Jane likes skiing.

LaPiere (1934) found that

Self-reported attitudes were not actually consistent with observed behavior

Rosenthal & Jacobson demonstrated that self-fulfilling prophecies could influence

Students IQ

Sherif (1954) observed considerably hostility between two groups of boys at camp. Which of the following contributed to that hostility?

The boys competed to earn a group prize The boys competed to earn individual prizes

Response opportunity

The teacher calls on students who he or she expects knows the answer

Input

The teacher challenged the smarter students with advanced work

Sherif (1954) observed what forms of hostility between the two groups?

Theft Intended flag burning (they felt moved enough to do this) Verbal abuse

LaPiere (1934) Results

They were only refused at one of the establishments they visited, and were generally treated very politely. Of the 128 establishments which responded to the letter, 91% said they were not willing to accept Chinese guests. Conclusion Attitudes do not always predict behavior. Cognitive and affective components of attitudes are not necessarily expressed in behavior. The LaPiere's study shows that the cognitive and affective components of attitudes (e.g. disliking Chinese people) do not necessarily coincide with behavior (e.g. serving them).

The consistency principle suggest that

We should behave in ways that are consistent with our attitudes

Prejudice

a negative attitude towards a group - it is the dislike that someone feels, perhaps very mild and subtle or perhaps outwardly hateful. As we have seen, prejudice (like any attitude) can be explicit or implicit, and the two do not always agree.

Attitude

a relatively enduring organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavioral tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor

Cognitive dissonance theory

one of the most important theories in social psychology, cognitive dissonance theory, concerns what happens when we detect the imbalance. The imbalance causes a negative arousal, sort of like a subconscious fight-or-flight reaction. Our brain's goal, at that point, is to resolve the imbalance (dissonance) and restore mental harmony. The scary thing is that if we're not paying attention, the judgments, decisions, and even feelings that seem objective might be biased by our natural instinct to reduce and avoid cognitive dissonance.

Attitude Strength Importance / personal relevance

refers to how significant the attitude is for the person and relates to self-interest, social identification and value. If an attitude has a high self-interest for a person it is going to be extremely important. As a consequence, the attitude will have a very strong influence upon a person's behavior. By contrast, an attitude will not be important to a person if it does not relate in any way to their life. The knowledge aspect of attitude strength covers how much a person knows about the attitude object. People are generally more knowledgeable about topics that interest them and are likely to hold strong attitudes as a consequence. Attitudes based on direct experience are more strongly held and influence behavior more than attitudes formed indirectly

Likert scales use ___ to measure attitudes

statements

The Pygmalion Effect and the Power of Positive Expectations

study on how teachers expectations about student intelligence actually made those students improve. climate factor, feedback, input, response opportunity

Discrimination

the way you treat someone relative to the way that you treat people from other groups. If you are just a mean jerk to everyone, or if you give raises to all of your employees, that's just your disposition. However, if you ignore, act rudely to, or even try to hurt someone because of prejudice towards their group, or give bigger raises to employees because they are similar to you, that would be discriminatory.

In Sherif's study, the "drinking water problem" was an example of

A superordinate goal

Categorize each of the following attribution as the self-serving bias

Dispositional attributions for successes, situational attributions for failures I could have cheated on that exam, but I didn't because I am an honest person I normally wouldn't cheat on an exam, but I had been sick and did not get a fair chance to study like everyone else

We would expect the greatest consistently between attitudes and behavior when those attitudes are particularly strong. According to the section you read on attitude strength, strength is correlated with

Factual knowledge Personal relevance Experience

Categorize each of the following attribution as examples of the FAE, the fundamental attribution error.

Failing to consider the situation influences on other people's behavior Making dispositional attributions for other people Wow, can you believe that guy showed up late for an exam? He must be really lazy and disorganized.

Implicit Attitudes

Implicit attitudes are essentially our automatic, subconscious evaluations... and in some cases they might be different from the explicit attitudes that we are aware of and would report on a self-report measure. Within a fraction of a second our brain assesses what we see and makes judgments about it, so on a subconscious level we might not even be aware of the way we tend to feel about things. The IAT is just one way that researcher have attempted to measure something that you cannot consciously describe for yourself.

LaPiere (1934) Methods

LaPiere travelled around America with a Chinese couple, expecting to meet discrimination as a result of anti Chinese feeling. At the time prejudice against Asians was widespread and there were no laws against racial discrimination. They visited 67 hotels and 184 restaurants. Six months later, after their return, all the establishments they had visited were sent a letter, asking whether they would accept Chinese guests.

Principle of consistency

One of the underlying assumptions about the link between attitudes and behavior is that of consistency. This means that we often or usually expect the behavior of a person to be consistent with the attitudes that they hold. reflects the idea that people are rational and attempt to behave rationally at all times and that a person's behavior should be consistent with their attitude(s). Whilst this principle may be a sound one, it is clear that people do not always follow it, sometimes behaving in seemingly quite illogical ways; for example, smoking cigarettes and knowing that smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease. There is evidence that the cognitive and affective components of behavior do not always match with behavior.

Self-perception theory suggests that

Our behavior shapes our attitudes

In 1965, Zimbardo, known for more "creative" research designs, told participants that they would be trying new foods that the military was testing out for combat zones. They were greeted by an experimenter (IV) who was randomly assigned to be either very nice to the participants and his coworkers, or who was very mean. Participants then had to eat a grasshopper (yes, they really ate it), and were later asked how much they liked it. Based on the predictions of cognitive dissonance theory, what do you expect they found?

Participants who ate the grasshopper for the mean researcher liked it more

Participant's in Stack et. al's (1988) study found things funnier because they were tricked into ___ while those in Wells & Petty's (1980) study agreed with a message because they were tricked into ___.

Smiling; nodding

Feedback

Some students are get more positive reinforcement for correct answers

Self-Perception study #1

Stack et al. (1988) had students read and rate a cartoon while holding a pen in their mouths. Some of them were asked to hold it with only their teeth, which requires contracting the muscles used to smile. Other students were told only to use their lips, which would interfere with the use of the smiling muscles. Consistent with self-perception theory, students who used their teeth to hold the pen rated the cartoon as funnier than students who held the pen with their lips.

Self-Perception Theory

The basic idea is that we infer our attitudes from our behavior. Much like the two component model of emotions we learned about earlier, we have to cognitively evaluate the evidence and decide what our attitude must be based on the evidence of our behavior and our situation. So, for example, if you were to ask me whether I liked pizza or not (an attitude), I would scan through my memory to find instances where I ate pizza or where I chose an alternative. If I can easily think of several times that I have eaten pizza, then my attitude towards pizza must be pretty positive. Our attitudes are based on the perceptions we have about our own behavior, hence "self-perception theory."

Climate

The teacher is warmer and nicer to the good students

In Festinger & Carlsmith's landmark study on dissonance,

Those paid only $1.00 had a more positive attitude towards the task because there was insufficient justification for the lie they had told

One disadvantage of measuring attitudes with a Likert scale is the fact that people might not be honest. Relating this back to what we learned about early on about self-report data, participants' answers might be compromised due to a social ___ bias.

desirability

Likert Scale

developed the principle of measuring attitudes by asking people to respond to a series of statements about a topic, in terms of the extent to which they agree with them, and so tapping into the cognitive and affective components of attitudes. use fixed choice response formats and are designed to measure attitudes or opinions. These ordinal scales measure levels of agreement/disagreement. assumes that the strength/intensity of experience is linear, i.e. on a continuum from strongly agree to strongly disagree, and makes the assumption that attitudes can be measured. Respondents may be offered a choice of five to seven or even nine pre-coded responses with the neutral point being neither agree nor disagree.

Balance Theory

says that if people see a set of cognitive elements as being a system, then they will have a preference to maintain a balanced state among these elements. In other words, if we feel we are 'out of balance', then we are motivated to restore a position of balance.The felt discomfort at imbalance will increase with the strength of the attitude and the overall interest in the matter.