Unit 4 - Attitude Formation and Attitude Change

Stereotype

a generalized (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized) belief about a group of people

Prejudice

unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group and its members. Generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action

Implicit Prejudice

aware of it

Explicit Prejudice

more common, unaware of it

Discrimination

the ability to differentiate between stimuli, or the act of acting on prejudice

Cognitive Load

refers to the amount of information our working memory can process at any given time

Implicit attitudes

evaluations that occur without conscious awareness towards an attitude object or the self

Just-World Phenomenon

the tendency for people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get

• "Homeless people are lazy and don't work so they deserve to be poor."

Out-group homogeneity effect

the perception of out-group members as more similar to one another than are in-group members

Ingroup bias

our tendency to favor our own group as opposed to the outgroup

Ethnocentrism

the prejudicial belief that one’s culture is superior to all other cultures. People tend to justify their culture’s social systems while judging others’ as "bad" or "wrong."

Belief Perseverance

clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited

Confirmation bias

the tendency to search for or put more value on information that confirms your beliefs, while disregarding opposing information

Cognitive Dissonance

the theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent.

• ex: when we become aware that our attitudes and our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes