Attitude Formation and Change

• An attitude is a set of beliefs and feelings.

  • Attitudes are evaluative, meaning that our feelings toward such things are necessarily positive or negative.

• The mere exposure effect states that the more one is exposed to something, the more one will come to like it.

• Persuasive messages can be processed through the central route or the peripheral route.

• The central route to persuasion involves deeply processing the content of the message; what about this potato chip is so much better than all the others? The peripheral route, on the other hand, involves other aspects of the message including the characteristics of the person imparting the message (the communicator).

The Relationship Between Attitudes and Behavior

• Cognitive dissonance theory is based on the idea that people are motivated to have consistent attitudes and behaviors.

  • When they do not, they experience unpleasant mental tension or dissonance.

• Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith conducted the classic experiment about cognitive dissonance in the late 1950s.

  • Their participants performed a boring task and were then asked to lie and tell the next subject (actually a confederate1 of the experimenter) that they had enjoyed the task.

Compliance Strategies

• Often people use certain strategies to get others to comply with their wishes.

• Such compliance strategies have also been the focus of much psychological research.

• The door-in-the-face strategy argues that after people refuse a large request, they will look more favorably upon a follow-up request that seems, in comparison, much more reasonable.

• Another common strategy involves using norms of reciprocity.

• People tend to think that when someone does something nice for them, they ought to do something nice in return.

• Norms of reciprocity are at work when you feel compelled to send money to the charity that sent you free return address labels or when you cast your vote in the student election for the candidate that handed out those delicious chocolate chip cookies.

Attribution Theory

• Attribution theory is another area of study within the field of social cognition.

  • Attribution theory tries to explain how people determine the cause of what they observe.

• Harold Kelley put forth a theory that explains the kind of attributions people make based on three kinds of information: consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus.

• Consistency refers to how similarly the individual acts in the same situation over time.

• Distinctiveness refers to how similar this situation is to other situations in which we have watched Charley.

• Consensus asks us to consider how others in the same situation have responded.

• A classic study involving self-fulfilling prophecies was Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson’s (1968) “Pygmalion in the Classroom” experiment.

Attributional Biases

• When looking at the behavior of others, people tend to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors and underestimate the role of situational factors.

  • This tendency is known as the fundamental attribution error.

• The fundamental attribution was named fundamental because it was believed to be so widespread.

• In an individualistic culture, like the American culture, the importance and uniqueness of the individual is stressed.

• In more collectivist cultures, like Japanese culture, a person’s link to various groups such as family or company is stressed.

• The false-consensus effect- The tendency for people to overestimate the number of people who agree with them.

• Self-serving bias is the tendency to take more credit for good outcomes than for bad ones.

• Researchers have found that people evidence a bias toward thinking that bad things happen to bad people.

  • This belief in a just world, known simply as the just-world bias, in which misfortunes befall people who deserve them, can be seen in the tendency to blame victims.

Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

• Stereotypes may be either negative or positive and can be applied to virtually any group of people (e.g., racial, ethnic, geographic).

• Prejudice is an undeserved, usually negative, attitude toward a group of people.

• Stereotyping can lead to prejudice when negative stereotypes (those rude New Yorkers) are applied uncritically to all members of a group (she is from New York, therefore she must be rude) and a negative attitude results.

• Ethnocentrism, the belief that one’s culture (e.g., ethnic, racial) is superior to others, is a specific kind of prejudice.

• People tend to see members of their own group, the in-group, as more diverse than members of other groups, out-groups.

  • This phenomenon is often referred to as out-group homogeneity.

• In-group bias is thought to stem from people’s belief that they themselves are good people.

Origin of Stereotypes and Prejudice

• Many different theories attempt to explain how people become prejudiced.

• Some psychologists have suggested that people naturally and inevitably magnify differences between their own group and others as a function of the cognitive process of categorization.

• By taking into account the in-group bias discussed above, this idea suggests that people cannot avoid forming stereotypes.

Combating Prejudice

• One theory about how to reduce prejudice is known as the contact theory.

• The contact theory, as its name suggests, states that contact between hostile groups will reduce animosity, but only if the groups are made to work toward a goal that benefits all and necessitates the participation of all.

  • Such a goal is called a superordinate goal.

• Muzafer Sherif’s (1966) camp study (also known as the Robbers Cave study) illustrates both how easily out-group bias can be created and how superordinate goals can be used to unite formerly antagonistic groups.

• He conducted a series of studies at a summer camp.

Aggression and Antisocial Behavior

• Instrumental aggression is when the aggressive act is intended to secure a particular end.

• Hostile aggression, on the other hand, has no such clear purpose.

• Sociobiologists suggest that the expression of aggression is adaptive under certain circumstances.

• One of the most influential theories, however, is known as the frustration-aggression hypothesis.

Prosocial Behavior

• Helping behavior is termed prosocial behavior.

• Much of the research in this area has focused on bystander intervention, the conditions under which people nearby are more and less likely to help someone in trouble.

• Counterintuitively, the larger the number of people who witness an emergency situation, the less likely any one is to intervene.

  • This finding is known as the bystander effect.

• One explanation for this phenomenon is called diffusion of responsibility.

  • The larger the group of people who witness a problem, the less responsible any one individual feels to help.

• People tend to assume that someone else will take action so they need not do so.

• Another factor contributing to the bystander effect is known as pluralistic ignorance.

• People seem to decide what constitutes appropriate behavior in a situation by looking to others.

Attraction

• Social psychologists also study what factors increase the chance that people will like one another.

• A significant body of research indicates that we like others who are similar to us, with whom we come into frequent contact, and who return our positive feelings.

• A term often employed as part of liking and loving studies is self-disclosure.

• One self-discloses when one shares a piece of personal information with another.

• Close relationships with friends and lovers are often built through a process of self-disclosure.

The Influence of Others on an Individual’s Behavior

• A major area of research in social psychology is how an individual’s behavior can be affected by another’s actions or even merely by another person’s presence.

• A number of studies have illustrated that people perform tasks better in front of an audience than they do when they are alone.

  • They yell louder, run faster, and reel in a fishing rod more quickly.

  • This phenomenon, that the presence of others improves task performance, is known as social facilitation.

• When the task being observed was a difficult one rather than a simple, well-practiced skill, being watched by others actually hurt performance, a finding known as social impairment.

• Conformity has been an area of much research as well.

  • Conformity is the tendency of people to go along with the views or actions of others.

• Solomon Asch (1951) conducted one of the most interesting conformity experiments.

Group Dynamics

• All groups have norms, rules about how group members should act.

• Within groups is often a set of specific roles.

• Sometimes people take advantage of being part of a group by social loafing.

  • Social loafing is the phenomenon when individuals do not put in as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone.

• Group polarization is the tendency of a group to make more extreme decisions than the group members would make individually.

  • Studies about group polarization usually have participants give their opinions individually, then group them to discuss their decisions, and then have the group make a decision.

• Groupthink, a term coined by Irving Janis, describes the tendency for some groups to make bad decisions.

  • Groupthink occurs when group members suppress their reservations about the ideas supported by the group.

• This loss of self-restraint occurs when group members feel anonymous and aroused, and this phenomenon is known as deindividuation.

• One famous experiment that showed not only how such conditions can cause people to deindividuation but also the effect of roles and the situation in general, is Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment.