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Chapter 10 pt 3

Attitudes

People’s evaluations of objects, events, or ideas
- Can be trivial (favorite soda) or grand issues (religion, politics)
- We can be aware of them or not
- They can be simple or complex
Attitudes are shaped by social context, and they play an important role in how we evaluate and interact with other people
People tend to develop negative attitudes about new things more quickly than they develop positive attitudes about them
familiarity effect: The more we are exposed to something, the more we tend to like it

Attitudes can be learned

Attitudes are acquired through classical conditioning (e.g., advertisers associate products with celebrities)
Attitudes can also be learned through operant conditioning (e.g., rewarding a student for studying may create a positive attitude toward studying)
Attitudes are also shaped through socialization Would you eat a worm?

What determines if attitudes translate into behavior?

Stronger, more personally relevant attitudes are more likely to predict behavior
- Someone who grew up in a strongly Democratic household is more likely to register as a Democrat and vote Democratic than someone who grew up in a more politically neutral environment
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Attitude specificity: The more specific the attitude, the more predictive it is
Attitudes formed through direct experience tend to predict behavior better
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Attitude accessibility: Easily activated attitudes are more stable, predictive of behavior, and resistant to change

Attitudes can function at different levels of cognitive awareness

Explicit attitudes: attitudes that a person can report
Implicit attitudes: attitudes that influence a person’s feelings and behavior at an unconscious level
People higher in self-reported (explicit) prejudice were less likely to vote for Obama
People who reported low levels of prejudice but whose scores on an implicit measure indicated negative attitudes about African Americans were also less likely to vote for Obama
- Even if you’re not aware of it, your attitudes affect your actions
Implicit-Association Test https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
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What happens when attributes and behaviors don’t line up?

Research example (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959):
- Participants performed an extremely boring task
  - Turning pegs a quarter of the way around for an hour
- Then, reported to other participants on how enjoyable it was
  - Did not lie
  - Paid $20
  - Paid $1
- Asked to report how much they ACTUALLY liked the task
Which group do you think reported liking it the most?
- The lying, highly paid group (my guess)
- Actual: Paid $1 to lie
  - Told themselves they must like if they’d lie about enjoying it for a dollar
Why??
- Discrepancy between attitudes and behavior led to an aversive emotional state (dissonance)
- Dissonance motivated people to reconcile these attitudes and behavior
Insufficient justification led to attitude change
Cognitive dissonance: an uncomfortable mental state due to a contradiction between two attitudes or between an attitude and a behavior
- Example: People experience cognitive dissonance when they smoke even though they know that smoking might kill them
People reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors They sometimes also rationalize or trivialize the discrepancies

Dissonance

Dissonance can also arise when a person holds positive attitudes about different options but has to choose one of the options
Postdecisional dissonance
- Motivates the person to focus on the positive aspects of the chosen option and on the negative aspects of the unchosen option(s)
- Effect occurs automatically, with minimal cognitive processing, and apparently without awareness

Spreading of Alternatives

- participants defended their original choice
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“Us vs. Them”

Think of any major conflict going on in the world
- How many are related to some type of group identity, group need, or group goal?
Evolutionarily, personal survival has depended on group survival
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- Keeping resources within a group while denying resources to outgroup members may have provided a selective advantage
- Which picture of James Franko do you think he would like better?
  - The mirrored one because that’s the way he’s used to looking at himself
  - we look at ourselves in the mirror

Types of groups

Groups to which we belong are ingroups; those to which we do not belong are outgroups
Social identity: the part of a person’s self concept that is based on his or her identification with a nation, religious group, political group, occupation, or other social affiliation

Us vs Them

People have strong emotional connections to these different identities
- The more central a given identity is to a person’s sense of self, the greater emotional investment
Ethnocentrism
- The belief that one’s own ethnic group, nation, or religion is superior to all others
- Universal phenomenon
- This belief increases commitment to group identity, influences behaviors
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  - Might motivate negative behavior

Who are we talking about?

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1. They are all the same
2. They can’t contribute to society in a meaningful way
3. They can’t drive well
4. Weak and helpless
5. Set in their ways
6. Can’t understand technology
  - We’re talking about old people

Stereotypes

Summary impression of a group, in which a person believes that all members of the group share a common trait or traits
- Audio 0:42:39.825108
Allow for easy, fast processing of social information
Occur automatically, largely outside of our awareness
Affect impression formation
Universal phenomenon
Nationality: American, British, French, Italian, etc.
- have certain pre-defined ideas about what these nationalities are like
Ethnic group: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian American, etc.
Age: teens vs. old people, “millenials”, “baby boomers”
Ideological: liberal vs. conservative, religious vs. atheistic
Role-specific stereotypes: “soccer mom”, professor
- soccer mom ex:
  - has kids. drives a mini-van
Can be positive, negative, or neutral
- Positive: welcoming, kind, polite
- Negative: uneducated, overweight, don’t wear shoes
- Neutral: conservative, like country music, “y’all”
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Vocab

term	definition
attitude	People’s evaluations of objects, events, or ideas
familiarity effect	The more we are exposed to something, the more we tend to like it
attitude specificity	the more specific the attitude the more predictive it is (Ex: You know your friend likes sodas, that doesn’t help you know which soda they’re going to get, but if they only like pepsi when it’s got natural sugar and in a glass bottle, they probably won’t get pepsi often)
explicit attitudes	attitudes that a person can report
implicit attitudes	attitudes that influence a person’s feelings and behavior at an unconscious level
Research example (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)	Study where participants did a boring task. One group did not lie, one was paid $20 to lie about enjoying it, and the last was paid $1 to lie. (Showed that people told themselves they must like the task if they would lie about enjoying it for a dollar)
cognitive dissonance	an uncomfortable mental state due to a contradiction between two attitudes or between an attitude and a behavior (ex: smoking justification)
Postdecisional dissonance	Motivates the person to focus on the positive aspects of the chosen option and on the negative aspects of the unchosen option(s)
ingroups	groups we belong to
outgroups	groups we don’t belong to
social identity	the part of a person’s self concept that is based on his or her identification with a nation, religious group, political group, occupation, or other social affiliation
ethnocentrism	The belief that one’s own ethnic group, nation, or religion is superior to all others
stereotype	Summary impression of a group, in which a person believes that all members of the group share a common trait or traits