Chapter 20 Study Notes: Attitudes and Social Cognition

Chapter 20: Attitudes and Social Cognition Learning Outcomes

After studying this chapter, students should be able to: - Define attitudes and their role in predicting behaviour. - Describe the social–cognitive processes people use to try to understand themselves and others. - Describe how the self-concept guides the way we think about and remember information relevant to ourselves.

The Nature of Attitudes

Definition: An attitude is an association between an act or object and an evaluation. It is a tendency to evaluate a person, concept, or group positively or negatively.
Example: Stating that alcohol is a dangerous drug involves alcohol as the attitude object and "dangerous" as the evaluation.
Tripartite Theory of Attitudes (ABC/CAB Model): - Affective (A): Feelings or emotions linked to an attitude object (e.g., "alcohol is bad"). - Behavioural (B): Past behaviours, experiences, or dispositions regarding an object (e.g., "alcohol should be avoided"). - Cognitive (C): Beliefs, thoughts, and attributes associated with an object (e.g., "alcohol contributes to traffic fatalities").
Attitude Strength: Refers to the durability (persistence over time and resistance to change) and impact (influence on thought and behaviour) of an attitude. - Attitude Importance: The personal relevance and psychological significance assigned to an attitude. Greater importance results in greater strength. - Attitude Accessibility: The ease with which an attitude comes to mind, often pulled automatically from memory when primed by environmental events. - Evolutionary Perspective: High accessibility is adaptive as it allows rapid reaction to frequent or impactful stimuli. - Downside: High accessibility can interfere with detecting changes in the attitude object; for example, a voter may fail to notice a politician's changing behaviour due to a rigid, highly accessible attitude.
Implicit vs. Explicit Attitudes: - Explicit Attitudes: Conscious associations that regulate thought and behaviour deliberately. - Implicit Attitudes: Automatic associations between objects and feelings that regulate behaviour unconsciously. - Project Implicit: A Harvard-based effort gathering data since $1998$ on implicit cognitions using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). - Research Finding: Rudman and Ashmore ( $2007$ ) found that implicit stereotypes were more predictive of discriminatory behaviour than implicit attitudes in intergroup relations.
Cognitive Complexity: The intricacy of thoughts about attitude objects. Research by Tetlock ( $1989$ ) showed that people at political extremes usually show less attitudinal complexity than moderates. - Gender Differences: Women often score higher on self-report measures of cognitive complexity than men, though partners in close relationships often display similar levels.
Attitudinal Ambivalence: The extent to which an attitude object is associated with conflicting evaluative responses (high positive/high negative). Indifference is characterized by low positive/low negative responses.
Attitudinal Coherence: The extent to which an attitude is internally consistent, particularly between cognitive and evaluative components.

Attitudes and Behaviour

Predictive Power: Broad attitudes often fail to predict specific behaviours accurately. A student's general attitude toward exercise does not necessarily predict if they will exercise on a specific day.
Specificity: Attitudes predict actions better when both are measured at a specific level (e.g., attitude toward "recycling" vs. "protecting the environment").
Environmental Factors: Behaviour is often under the control of environmental consequences (reinforcement) rather than just attitudes.
Group Endorsement: Consistency increases if important social groups share and validate the attitude.
Aggregation Principle: Like personality traits, attitudes predict behaviour better when averaged across many situations over the long run.
Attitude Acquisition: Attitudes shaped by personal experience have a stronger impact. Regan and Fazio ( $1977$ ) found that students personally affected by a housing shortage were more likely to take action than those who just held a negative opinion of it.

Persuasion and Attitude Change

Persuasion: Deliberate efforts to change an attitude.
Aristotle's Rhetoric: - Ethos: Characteristics of the speaker (Source). - Pathos: Appeal of the message (Emotional). - Logos: Logic of the argument (Reasoning).
Components of Persuasion: - Source: More persuasive when seen as credible (expert/trustworthy), attractive, likeable, powerful, and similar to the receiver. - Message: Fear appeals are effective provided the recipient believes the threat applies to them and that they can take action to avoid it. If too frightening, it may lead to denial. - Channel: Verbal, nonverbal, in-person, or via media. A New Zealand study (Weatherall, $2004$ ) found nearly $50\%$ of words in SMS were non-standard (e.g., "u" and "2"). - Context: The presence of competing messages or background factors (e.g., soft music, cheering supporters). - Receiver: Includes high "need for cognition" (tendency to reflect on arguments) vs. low need.
Attitude Inoculation: Building resistance by presenting weak arguments for the opposing view, prompting the receiver to develop "antibodies" or counter-arguments.
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM): - Central Route: Involves careful thinking and weighing of arguments. Effective when elaboration likelihood is high (motivated and able to think). - Peripheral Route: Appeals to less rational processes (heuristics, emotions, attractiveness of source). Effective when elaboration likelihood is low (distracted or unmotivated).
Repetition (Mere Exposure Effect): Repeated messages produce familiarity and liking (Zajonc, $1968$ ). Over time, people may forget the source and assume a repeated message is credible.

Conservation Psychology

Definition: The scientific study of reciprocal relationships between humans and nature to encourage conservation.
Philosophy: Environmental problems are fundamentally behavioural problems (Kogan & Winter, $2010$ ).
APA Task Force ( $2009$ ): Focuses on six questions, including how people understand climate risk, psychological barriers to action, and how psychologists can assist in limiting climate change.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Definition: Developed by Leon Festinger ( $1957$ ), it refers to the psychological tension (arousal) experienced when there is a discrepancy between an attitude and a behaviour, or between two cognitive elements.
Resolution: Individuals reduce tension by changing the attitude, changing the behaviour, or adding new cognitive elements to justify the discrepancy.
Festinger and Carlsmith ( $1959$ ) Study: - Participants performed boring tasks then were paid either $\$1$ or $\$20$ to tell a confederate the task was enjoyable. - Results: Those paid $\$1$ rated the task more enjoyable than those paid $\$20$ . - Reasoning: $\$1$ was insufficient justification for lying, creating high dissonance that required an attitude change to resolve ("I actually liked the task"). $\$20$ provided sufficient external justification, so no attitude change was necessary.
Post-Decision Dissonance: Regret following a choice leads to justifying the choice by "talking up" the chosen option and denigrating the rejected one.
Cognitive vs. Automatic: Research with amnesiacs (Lieberman et al., $2001$ ) showed they experience dissonance reduction even without conscious memory of their previous actions, suggesting it is an automatic process.
Self-Perception Theory: Daryl Bem's ( $1967$ ) non-motivational alternative; people infer their attitudes by observing their own behaviour.

Social Cognition and Identity

Social Cognition: Processes by which people make sense of themselves, others, social interactions, and relationships.
Models of Representation: - Schemas: Organized patterns of thought (e.g., theatre schemas). - Prototypes: Abstract, generalized images of a category. - Connectionist Models: Views representations as patterns of activation in neural networks operating in parallel.
Identity: - Personal Identity: Individual sense of self. - Social Identity: Commonalities with specific groups. - Cultural Identity: Sense of belonging to a distinct ethnic group.
Identity Conflicts: Clashes between roles (e.g., working mother) can cause dissonance. Kahu and Morgan ( $2007$ ) found mothers used job-like language to describe parenting to reduce this conflict.

Person Perception and First Impressions

First Impressions: Initial perceptions that create a frame of reference for all subsequent information.
Luchins ( $1957$ ) Study: Order of information about "Jim" significantly changed evaluations; $78\%$ saw him as friendly when positive info came first, vs. $18\%$ when negative info came first.
Halo Effect: The tendency to assume that positive qualities cluster together. Physically attractive people are often judged as smarter or friendlier ( $Dion et al., 1972$ ).
Academic Bias: Malouff et al. ( $2014$ ) found university markers gave higher scores to written work if the student had previously given a high-quality oral presentation.

Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Racism

Stereotypes: Characteristics attributed to people based on group membership. They simplify experience but can be inaccurate and resistant to new information.
Encoding-Flexibility Principle: Jurors process information better when a defendant's gender matches the stereotype of the crime (McKimmie et al., $2013$ ).
Prejudice: Judging people based on stereotypes.
Discrimination: Behaviours following from negative attitudes toward group members.
Racism: Prejudicial attitudes based on a belief in a biological hierarchy.
Statistics: - $12.4\%$ of Māori experienced unfair treatment in health care/housing ( $2011\u20132012$ ). - $43\%$ of Indigenous Australians reported disrespectful treatment based on ethnicity. - $45\%$ of Indigenous and migrant children in Australia ( $10\u201311$ years) reported bullying (Priest et al., $2019$ ).
Authoritarian Personality: Adorno et al. ( $1950$ ) proposed that strict, stern parenting leads to adult personalities that project rage onto minority groups.
Subtle/Symbolic Racism: Beliefs used by a majority group to justify dominance while claiming not to be racist.
Stereotype Rebound: Attempting to suppress a stereotype can lead to it becoming more intense once the suppression effort ends (Macrae et al., $1998$ ).

Ingroups, Outgroups, and Cooperation

Ingroups vs. Outgroups: "Us" vs. "Them."
Jane Elliott ( $1968$ ): Divided her Year $3$ class by eye colour, leading to immediate discrimination and performance drops in the "inferior" group.
Robber’s Cave Experiment (Sherif et al., $1961$ ): Created conflict between the "Rattlers" and "Eagles." Hostility was only reduced through Superordinate Goals (goals requiring cooperation, such as fixing a water tank or pulling a food truck).
Social Identity Theory: People derive self-esteem from their group membership and have a motivational need to see their ingroup as superior (Tajfel, $1981$ ).
Ostracism: Being ignored or excluded. It threatens four basic needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaning (Williams, $2007$ ).

Attribution Theory

Attribution: Inferring the causes of mental states and behaviours.
Weiner’s Attribution Model: Individuals seek understanding, attribute to a cause, and then base future behaviour on that cause.
Kelley’s Covariation Model: People use three types of info to decide between internal (person) and external (situation) attributions: - Consensus: How most people respond (high consensus suggests situational cause). - Consistency: How the person always responds (low consistency suggests outside fluke). - Distinctiveness: If the person responds this way to different stimuli (high distinctiveness suggests a specific situational reaction).
Discounting: Downplaying a variable because other contributing variables are known.
Augmentation: Increasing an internal attribution when a behaviour occurs despite situational pressures (e.g., being cold to a boss when there is no deadline stress).
Attributional Styles: - Optimistic: Internalize good events; externalize bad events. - Pessimistic: Internalize negative events as stable and global; high risk for depression.
Earthquake Preparedness: In New Zealand, McClure ( $2001$ ) found fatalistic attributions for earthquake damage led to a lack of preparation.

Biases in Social Information Processing

Fundamental Attribution Error (Correspondence Bias): The tendency to attribute others' behaviour to personality while ignoring situational causes.
Self-Serving Bias: Seeing oneself in a more positive light than deserved. This is highly prevalent in Western cultures but less so in collectivist cultures like Japan.
Confirmation Bias: The tendency to seek information that confirms existing hypotheses.
Clinicans: Research shows that even trained clinicians succumb to social-cognitive biases like the fundamental attribution error.

The Self

Definition: The person, including mental processes, body, and personality.
William James: Distinction between the "I" (self as subject/experiencer) and the "Me" (self as object/concept).
Actual Self: Views of how one is.
Ideal Self: Hopes and aspirations of how one would like to be.
Ought Self: Duties and obligations of how one should be.
Self-Esteem: The affective/evaluative component of the self. - Peaks between ages $50$ and $60$ . - Men generally report higher self-esteem than women ( $Bleidorn et al., 2016$ ).
Maintaining Self-Esteem: - Downward Social Comparison: Comparing oneself to those worse off. - Self-Handicapping: Setting up obstacles to failure to preserve the ego (e.g., practicing less for a golf test if stereotype threat is present). - Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing): Announcing affiliation with a successful group ("We won!") and distancing from failure ("They lost!").
Self-Monitoring: The degree to which people manage their impressions. "High self-monitors" are social chameleons who change based on the situation.

Questions & Discussion

Opening case on COVID-19 Vaccines: $\$90\%$ of eligible adults in Australia and New Zealand were vaccinated by early $2022$ . Protests often framed mandatory vaccination as "medical apartheid."
Conspiracy Beliefs: Dr. Philip Chilton notes that anti-vaxxers often see themselves as knowing a "truth" for which they are being punished. Dr. Mathew Marques found $20\%$ of people believed the 5G cover-up, and $1$ in $10$ believed fluoride was for mind control.
Inquiry into Social vs. Non-Social Cognition: Social cognition is qualitatively different because it involves reciprocal interaction, is infused with emotion, depends on cultural value judgments, and involves unobservable data (unspoken intentions).