Download Attribution, Attitude, and Cognitive Dissonance

Thought QuestionsJot down your thoughts!
• Why do you obey some rules and
disobey others at school?
• Have you ever been convinced by
friends to do something you knew was
wrong? To do something you knew
was right?
• Do you consider yourself a conformist
or a nonconformist? Why?
CHS AP Psychology
Unit 14: Social Pyschology
Essential Task 12-1:Apply attribution theory
to explain the behavior of others with
specific attention to the fundamental
attribution error, self-serving bias, justworld hypothesis and differences
between collectivistic and individualistic
cultures
Social Psychology
• The scientific study of the ways in
which the thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors of one individual are
influenced by the real, imagined, or
inferred behavior or characteristics of
other people
Social Cognition: How you think
about people?
• Impression Formation – how do you
construct your social cognition?
– Primacy effect
•Early information about someone
weighs more than later information in
forming impressions
•We are “cognitive misers”
– Self-fulfilling prophecy
•A person’s expectations about another
elicits behavior from the other person that
confirms the expectations
•“Hostile” partners continued to be more
hostile
Impression Formation
• Schemata
– Ready-made categories
– Allow us to make inferences about others
(good for cognitive misers)
– Also plays a major role in how we interpret
and remember information
– We will remember characteristics of our
schema that weren’t there
Impression Formation
• Stereotypes
– A set of characteristics believed to be
shared by all members of a social
category
– It is usually unfair
– Most often applied to sex, race,
occupation, physical appearance, place
of residence, membership in a group or
organization
– Can become the basis for self-fulfilling
prophecies
Attribution
• Attribution Theory: tries to explain how
people make judgments about the
causes of other people’s behavior
• Three criteria used to judge behavior
– Distinctiveness: Is this how the person
treats everyone or are you different?
– Consistency: Has the person always
treated you this way or is this different?
– Consensus: Do other people do this same
thing or is this really different?
Attribution: Why did he do that?
Example
• Bob walks past you without saying hi.
– Distinctiveness: Your explanation as to
why Bob did this will be different if he does
this to everyone in the hall or just you
– Consistency: Your explanation as to why
Bob did this will be different if he always
says hi to you or if you don’t really know
each other.
– Consensus: Whether you’re in New York
vs. a college of 600 will change how you
explain Bob’s behavior.
Biases in Attribution: The errors to which
your guesses will succumb
• Actor-Observer Effect: attribute actions of others to
internal factors and the actions of yourself to
external factors
– Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to
overemphasize personal causes for others’
behavior and underemphasize personal causes
for our own behavior
• Defensive attribution
– Self-Serving Bias: Tendency to attribute our
successes to our own efforts and our failures to
external factors
– Just-world hypothesis: Assumption bad things
happen to bad people and good things happen
to good people
• Attribution across cultures varies dramatically
Effects of Attribution
How we explain someone’s behavior affects
how we react to it.
Attitudes: feelings, often influenced by our
beliefs, that predispose our reactions to objects, people,
and events
• The Nature of Attitudes
– Relatively stable
• Beliefs – facts and general knowledge
• Feelings – love, hate, like, dislike
• Behaviors – inclination to approach, avoid,
buy
• Self-monitoring
– High self-monitors look for cues about how they
are expected to behave
• Makes using attitudes to predict behavior
difficult
– Low self-monitors express and act on their
attitudes consistently making prediction easier
Attitude Development
• Many factors contribute to the
development of attitudes
–
–
–
–
–
Imitation
Reward
Teachers
Peers
Mass media
Attitudes Can Affect Action
Our attitudes predict our behaviors
imperfectly because other factors,
including the external situation, also
influence behavior.
Attitude Change
• Process of persuasion
– Must get and maintain the person’s
attention
– Must comprehend the message
– Comprehension leads to acceptance
Attitude Change
• How the message gets
comprehended and then accepted is
by these things:
– Source (credibility is key)
– Message itself (more effective when it
acknowledges other arguments and then
gives novel ones – a little fear is good)
– Medium of communication (writing good
for complex, media better for audience
with a gist, face-to-face is the best)
– Audience’s characteristics
Routes a Message Can Take to
Persuade You
• Central Route to Persuasion
– when the attitude of the audience, or individual,
is changed as a result of thoughtful consideration
of the message.
• Peripheral Route to Persuasion occurs when
positive or negative cues (such as images, sounds,
or language) are associated with the object of the
message.
– An advertisement featuring a song that the
audience member likes, or a person whom the
audience member sees as appealing might
cause a person to have positive feelings toward
the brand, without that person ever thinking
deeply about the message.
Other techniques
•Foot-in-the-door phenomenon
•Low-ball technique
•Brainwashing
•Write-it-down technique
•Fifty-words-or-less technique
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
• (Leon Festinger 1957)
• Occurs whenever a person has two
contradictory cognitions or beliefs at
the same time. They are dissonant,
each one implies the opposite of the
other.
• The less coerced and more responsible
we feel for an action the more
dissonance. The more dissonance the
more likely we are to change our
attitude
• It creates an unpleasant cognitive
tension and the person tries to resolve
in the following ways: (see next slide)
Audience Characteristics
• Most difficult to change if
– Strong commitment to present attitude
– Attitude is shared by others
– The attitude has been held since early
childhood
• Up to a point the larger the difference
between message and audience the
more likely attitudinal change will
occur
• Low self-esteem more likely to change
Resolution of Cognitive
Dissonance
1. Sometimes changing your attitude is the
easiest way to solve this.
– Example: I am a loyal friend, but yesterday I
gossiped about my friend Chris . . . Well I can’t
change my action . . . but I don’t want to
change my view of myself, so my attitude about
Chris must be wrong. He is more of an
acquaintance than a friend.
2. Increase the number of consonant
elements – the number of thoughts that
back one side.
– It was awesome gossip
3. Reduce the importance of one or both of
the sides
–
The person I gossiped with won’t really tell that
many people.