PSYCH 253 - Week #3: The Self & Attitudes, Behavior, and Persuasion

Self-Concepts

The way a person looks at himself/herself

- context/situation dependent and flexible to some extent

Self-Awareness

- Doesn't develop until 15-24 months in kids

- Most animals don't have this self-awareness: gorillas, rhesusmonkeys, dogs, cats, pigs, giraffes,horses, parrots, etc.)

- but some do

Chimpanzees for Self-Awareness

chimpanzees raised in social isolation do not have this basic self-awareness, which means that there's something in the social environment that helps organisms develop a sense of self

Self-Esteem

The feeling of confidence in one's own abilities or worth; alternately, it is one's general positive or negative feeling toward oneself

A combination of a trait (something that is stable over time) and a state (something that varies depending on the specific context)

Lake Wobegon effect

We over-estimate our abilities, especially compared with others - positive over negative self-esteem

What is one way self-esteem can be determined internally?

By comparing the actual self to the ideal self (who you want to be).

Social Comparisons

Judging yourself by comparing your abilities, successes, and personality to other people.

What dimensions do we engage in social comparisions?

Those relevant to the self - so things we actively engage in eg. research, climbing

What are the consequences of social comparison?

Depends on direction, and can be positive or negative (think and understand the 4 cubed chart)

What factor has an influence of positive or negative outcomes?

Who you're comparing to and your beliefs

Counterfactual Thinking Experiment

Observational study

Dunning-Kruger Effect

Describes the tendency for unskilled people to be overconfident in their ability and highly skilled people to underestimate their ability

Impression Management

The attempt by people to get others to seem them as they want to be seen

Draumaturgical analysis

a model of impression management put forth by Erving Goffman using theatre as a metaphor for how we manage impressions in real life

Self-Handicapping

how people avoid effort or create obstacles for themselves as a means of both - Preserving their own self-esteem - Managing the impressions of others

Behavioral self-handicapping

people act in ways that reduce the likelihood that they will succeed on a task so that if they fail, they can blame it on the obstacles they created rather than on their lack of ability

you do something that genuinely makes your performance worse, so if you fail you have an excuse.

Claimed self-handicapping

-person claims something else impedes performance

-didnt get enough sleep

-had other exams on mind

you announce an obstacle (real or fake) before performance, even if it doesn't actually affect you much.

I barely studied so if I do bad it doesn't mean I'm dumb vs I had no time to study at all

Behavioural vs Claimed

Attidues

The evaluation of objects, people, and ideas (things with VALUE) - evaluating is how people navigate the world around them rather then senses

Where do attitudes come from

Nature and nurture/inherited

Attitudes and Heritability

An experiment with monozygotic and dizygotic twins demonstrated how there is a strong genetic component of specific attitude items - people are going to biologically feel more strong about things than others.

Mere Exposure Effect

This study was performed by Bob Zajonc, (famous psychologist who studied attitudes and emotions).

hypothesis - people come to have positive attitudes toward those stimuli to which they are frequently exposed.

• IV: # of times different "Turkish words" were shown to participants

• DV: ratings of whether these words meant good or bad things (on a continuous scale)

Mere Exposure Effect findings

The more participants that had been previously exposed to a nonsense word, the more they rated that word as positive.

- suggests that the nature of our experiences can fundamentally shift our attitudes

Meta-Analysis of mere exposure effect findings

explored 268, found evidence for it but few modifications:

- no mere exposure for auditory stimuli, only visual

- children had much larger mere exposure effects than adults

- pattern of result is curved - liking does not continue to go up with more exposures

Classical Conditioning

A stimulus elicits an emotional response is paired with a neural stimulus - that neural stimulus takes on emotional properties of the first stimulus

operant conditioning

Freely chosen behaviours increase or decrease when followed by reinforcement or punishment.

eg. an animal learns to associates a certain behaviour with reward

Positive = introducing reward/punishment

Negative = taking away reward/punishment

Persuasion

The process by which a message induces change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors

Central routes to persuasion

Employ direct, relevant, logical message; requires controlled processing to be effective

Peripheral routes to persuasion

Rely on superficial cues that have little to do with logic (does this remind you of something?

Persuasion - Reciprocity

Obligation to give when you receive

Mint Study

eg. of reciprocity

DV: tipping

IV: order of effect - 1 mint + another mint "just for you > 2 mints > 1 mint

Persuasion - Scarcity

People want more of those things there are less of

Changing perceived scarcity

Enough to change people's attitudes toward products. 0 big part of art's value and collectible items

Persuasion - Authority

People will follow credible knowledgable experts - but can be faked with signals (degrees, uniforms)

Pitfalls

eg. of authority

Expertise in one domain can be mistaken for experitse in others eg. doctors

Persuasion - Consistency

Looking for and asking for commitments that can be made

Foot-in-the-door

eg. of consistency

refers to a small initial commitment that is then escalated with larger requests

IV: people asked (versus not asked) to put small drive safely card in their window more likely to agree to put up a large yard sign

DV: what percentage of people were willing to put up the large yard sign

Smth led to higher percentage of people

Persuasion - Liking

People who are similar, who pay us compliments, who cooperative with us

Impression management strategy

Persuasion - Consensus

People will look to the actions of others to determine their own

- Saying that "a high percentage of people do this" is a good strategy for persuading people to do a given behavior

--- Tied to do the idea of social norms (Prentice & Paluck)