Download PowerPoint Slide Set Westen Psychology 2e

Psychology: Brain, Mind,
and Culture, 2e
by
Drew Westen
Paul J. Wellman
Texas A&M University
John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
PowerPoint  Presentation: Chapter 17
Attitudes and Social Cognition
Lecture Outline
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
Attitudes
Social Cognition
 Prejudice
 Attribution Theory

The Self
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Social Psychology

Social Psychology examines the influence
of social processes on the way people
think, feel, and behave
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Examples of social psychology
issues include:
 Attitudes towards objects and people
• Importance in advertising
 Stereotypes about nations and people
 Knowledge of others and yourself
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Attitudes

An attitude is an association between an
act or object and an evaluation
 Involves positive or negative impressions
 Involves three components:
• Cognitive: “Marijuana is a gateway drug”
• Emotional: “Marijuana is extremely dangerous”
• Behavioral: “I will not smoke marijuana”

Attitudes vary in strength: refers to
whether the attitude is durable (long
lasting) and whether the attitude alters
behavior
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Attitude Issues

Attitude beliefs vary along several
dimensions:
 Specificity versus generality
 Complexity
 Interconnection with other attitudes

Attitude evaluations also can vary:
 Intensity: Refers to the strength of the
positive or negative impression
 Ambivalence: An attitude can be associated
with negative and positive valence
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Attitudes and Behavior

Strongly held attitudes toward people or
objects should predict behavior:
 Early studies document that attitudes may not
reliably predict behavior:
 LaPiere (1934): wrote to 251 hotels and
restaurants to inquire whether these would
serve Chinese patrons: most said “NO!”
• LaPiere had earlier visited these hotels and
restaurants in the company of a young Chinese
couple but were rarely denied
• Lapiere noted that behavior may not be predicted
by attitude
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Why Would Behaviors Not be
Predicted by Attitudes?

The attitude and the behavior may be at
different levels of generality and specificity
 Better prediction when attitude and behaviors
are specific and match in generality

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Attitudes are only one determinant of
behavior
Attitudes can involve implicit and explicit
components
 Implicit (automaticcomponents) may
dominate but are difficult to assess
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Persuasion
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
Persuasion refers to deliberate attempts
to change the attitude of another
Two channels by which to alter attitudes:
 Central route: Determine the best means to
have a recipient consider arguments to
change their attitude
 Peripheral route: Appeal to the emotions of
the recipient
• Classical conditioning of an object with an
emotional response
• Simple repetition of a message can alter attitude
change
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Issues in Persuasion
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Source: Look for speakers who are
credible, attractive, likeable, and powerful
Message: Whether the message presents
only one side of an issue or both can
make a difference
Channel: Whether the message is given
in person or via email (in person appeals
are more difficult to deny)
Context: Soft music in the background
can facilitate attitude change
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Behavioral Change

Another means to alter attitudes is to
induce a behavioral change that will
promote an attitude change
 “Foot-in-the-door” technique: ask person to
comply with small request, then ask for large
request
• Ask your parents for $3.00 for tuition and then
follow up a few weeks later for $300.00
• Ask a potential dating partner to go to lunch prior
to asking them out for dinner
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Cognitive Dissonance

Persons experience anxiety when faced
with a mismatch between their attitudes
and their behaviors
 Anxiety is aversive
 Person will work to reduce the anxiety
 Can’t change the behavior, but can change
the attitude
• Resembles “drive reduction” theory
 Subjects asked to lie about a boring study after
accepting $1 showed greater attitude change about
the task than did subjects paid $20 to lie
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Social Cognition
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
Social cognition refers to how we mentally
reconstruct the social world
Cognitive models are being use to
understand social phenomena
 Schemas as organizing principles
 Connectionist models and parallel processing
 The notion of implicit versus explicit
processing in social cognition
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Issues in Social Cognition

Social cognition involves the following:
 Ambiguity is the rule in social cognition.
Persons can only access behaviors in their
observations of others.
 Emotion plays a key role in social cognition
(positive versus negative valence)
 Social cognition varies with culture
 Reciprocal relations in social cognition. A
person acts upon others and is acted upon.
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
First Impressions

Is the person in paragraph A more friendly
than the person described in B?
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
(Figure adapted from Luchins, 1957, pp. 34-35)
Social Schemas

Schemas are patterns of thought that
organize our experiences
 Person schemas: Represent specific people or
types of people (librarians, extroverts)
 Situation schemas: Represent different kinds of
social situations (how to use silverware at a
formal dinner)
 Role schemas: Represent shared expectations
for a person in a role (student, professor,
parent)
 Relationship schemas: Represent expectations
about self and others in unique relationships
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Stereotypes and Prejudice
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Schemas allow us to enter new social
situations with some idea as to how we and
others are to act.
Schemas can be rigid and prone to error:
 Stereotypes: Represent characteristics
assigned to persons based on their
membership in a specific group
 Prejudice: Involves judging others based on a
stereotype
 Discrimination: Acting negatively toward a
person
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Racism

Racism reflects a negative attitude toward
members of a racial group
 Stereotype is the cognitive component
 Prejudice is the emotional component
 Discrimination is the behavioral component

Roots of racism may lie in personality
• The Authoritarian Personality involves the
tendency to hate people who are different
• This personality type is associated with a
dominant, stern father and a submissive mother
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Implicit Racism
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
Explicit racism involves the conscious use
of stereotypes and the expression of
prejudice
Implicit racism is the unconscious
influence of stereotypes toward members
of a racial group
 In ambiguous situations, whites tend to
• Be less helpful toward blacks than other whites
• Believe in stiffer legal penalties for black criminals
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Roots of Prejudice

Prejudice reflects socialization processes
from parent to child
 India: Children shows signs of prejudice by
age 4 or 5
 United States: Children prefer majority
culture by the preschool years

Prejudice is functional?
 The notion that prejudice preserves the
interests of the dominant classes
• E.g. Apartheid in South Africa
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Inter-Group Hostility

Ingroups versus outgroups: Persons
who belong to your group or not
 Persons not in your group are perceived as
more homogeneous than they really are
 The positive actions of outgroup members
are explained away while their negative
behaviors are attributed to internal causes

Reducing intergroup hostility:
 Sherif’s study: Requires contact AND
cooperation among the group members
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Attribution
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Attribution refers to the process of inferring
the causes of mental states and behaviors
of yourself and of others
We are “intuitive scientists”:
 Try to determine the extent to which
situations, persons, and behaviors vary with
each other
• External attributions: Behavior is due to the
situation: “The boss yelled at me because this is
April 15th and his taxes are not done…”
• Internal attributions: Behavior reflects the person:
The boss yells at everyone… even his mom…”
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Issues in Attribution

Whether attributions are made to the person
or the situation depends on:
 Consensus: The extent to which a behavior is
operative in a group
• Consensus responses induce bias toward viewing
the behavior as situational
 Consistency: Refers to the extent to which a
person responds reliably to a stimulus.
• Consistent responses elicit internal attributions
 Distinctiveness: Extent to which person
responds to different stimuli
• Distinctive responses elicit internal attributions
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Processes that Modulate Attribution

Discounting: Person downplays the role
of a variable because of the influence of
another variable
 My boss is not a jerk (Internal attribution for
rudeness), but rather has a high-stress job
(external attribution)

Augmentation refers to an increase in an
internal attribution for certain behaviors
 Drunk driver who drank another beer after
causing a fatal crash: Sentence = 202
years
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Biases in Social Cognition
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Correspondence bias: Tendency to
assume internal causes for persons
behavior, rather than external situations
Self-serving bias: Tendency for a
person to view themselves more
positively than they deserve:
 Person who sees a photograph of
themselves may question how the camera
could take a “bad picture”
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Copyright
Copyright 1999 by John Wiley and Sons, New
York, NY. All rights reserved. No part of the
material protected by this copyright may be
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission of the
copyright owner.
© 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.