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Review Session 5
Attitude Formation and Change

Attitude- a set of beliefs and feelings
 Evaluative- our feelings toward things are
necessarily positive or negative

Mere Exposure Effect- the more one is
exposed to something (or someone), the
more one will come to like it
Attitude Formation and Change

Persuasive Messages
 Central route- deeply processing the content
of the message
 Peripheral route- involves other aspects of
the message including the characteristics of
the person giving the message
Attitudes and Behavior
The relationship between attitudes and
behaviors in far from perfect.
 Cognitive Dissonance Theory- people
are motivated to have consistent
attitudes and behaviors.

 When they do not, they experience
unpleasant mental tension or dissonance
Attitudes and Behavior
 Festinger and Carlsmith
○ Participants performed a boring task and were
asked to lie to a confederate to say they had
enjoyed the task
○ Some paid $1, others paid $20
○ Afterward, their attitudes toward the task were
measured
○ Those who were paid $1 had more positive
attitudes
Compliance Strategies
Used to get other people to comply with
our wishes
 Foot-in-the-door- get people to agree to a
small request and they will be more likely
to agree to a larger follow-up request
 Door-in-the-face- after people refuse a
large request, they will look
more favorably upon a
favorable request that seems,
in comparison, much more
reasonable

Compliance Strategies

Norms of Reciprocity- people tend to
think that when someone does
something nice for them, they should do
something nice in return
Attribution Theory

How people determine the cause of what they
observe
 Dispositional/Personal Attribution
○ “Evan is good at math.” “That salesperson is a total jerk.”
 Situational Attribution○ “It was an easy test.” “She must be having a stressful day.”
 Person-Stable Attribution
○ “He has always been so good at math.”
 Person-Unstable Attribution
○ “He must have studied really hard for this test”
 Situation-Stable Attribution
○ “His teacher always gives the easiest tests”
 Situation-Unstable Attribution
○ “This one test must have been very easy.”
Attribution Theory
Harold Kelley- Attributions are based on 3 Things:
Consistency
Distinctiveness
Consensus
How similarly
the individual
acts in the same
situation over
time
How similar the
situation is to
other situations
we have watched
this person
How have
others in the
same situation
responded?
Attribution Theory

People often have certain ideas of
prejudices about people before they
even meet them.
 These can affect the way someone acts
toward another person

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy- these
expectations about others can influence
the way those others behave
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968)



Randomly selected a group of children
Told their teachers that they were ripe for
intellectual progress and would “bloom” over the
school year.
IQ scores of the identified children increased
more than their classmates.
Attributional Bias

Fundamental Attribution Error- when
looking at the behavior of others, we
tend to overestimate the influence of
dispositional factors and underestimate
the role of situational factors
 Opposite when we explain our own
behaviors
 May be far less likely to occur in
collectivist cultures
Attributional Bias
False-Consensus Effect- tendency to
overestimate the number of people who
agree with us
 Self-Serving Bias- the tendency to take
more credit for good outcomes than for
bad ones
 Just-World Bias- Bad things happen to
bad people (tendency to blame victims)

Stereotypes

Ideas about what members of different
groups are like
 These expectations may influence the way
we interact with members of these groups
 Can be positive or negative
 Rigid and difficult to change
Prejudice

An underserved, usually negative,
attitude toward a group of people
 Stereotypes can lead to prejudice when
negative stereotypes are applied uncritically
to all members of a group
 Ethnocentrism- a specific kind of prejudice
○ The belief that one’s culture is superior to
others
Discrimination

Involves an action
 “We all have prejudices, but it should be our
goal to keep our prejudices from becoming
discrimination.”
Out-Group Homogeneity- people tend to
see members of their own group as
more divers than members of other
groups
 In-Group Bias- a preference for
members of one’s own group

Origins of Stereotypes/Prejudice

Some say that people naturally and
inevitably form stereotypes (in-group
bias)
 A function of the cognitive process of
categorization

Stereotypes and prejudice can be
learned and unlearned by parents, etc.
(Social Learning Theory)
Combating Prejudice

Contact Theory- contact between hostile
groups will reduce animosity, but only if
groups are made to work toward a goal
that benefits all (superordinate goals)
Aggression
Instrumental Aggression- intended to
secure a particular end
 Hostile Aggression- has no clear
purpose
 Frustration-Aggression Hypothesisfeelings of frustration make aggression
more likely
 Exposure to aggressive model makes
people aggressive (Bandura)

Prosocial Behavior

Bystander Intervention- the conditions
under which people nearby are more
and less likely to help someone in
trouble
 Diffusion of responsibility- the larger the
number of people who witness an
emergency situation, the less likely any one
is to intervene
 Pluralistic ignorance- people seem to decide
what constitutes appropriate behavior in a
situation by looking to others
Attraction

Similarity- we like those who are similar
 No evidence that opposites attract

Proximity- we like those with whom we have
frequency contact
 Mere-exposure effect



Reciprocal liking- we like those who return our
positive feelings
Physical attractiveness
matters!
Close relationships are built
through a process of
selfdisclosure
The Influence of Others
Social Facilitation- the presence of
others improves task performance
 Social Impairment- when the task being
observed was a difficult one rather than
a simple, well-practiced skill, it
will actually hurt performance

The Influence of Others

Conformity- the tendency to go along
with the actions of others
 Solomon Asch- vertical lines test; in about
1/3 of the cases participants conformed to
the incorrect answer
 Most likely to conform when
the group opinion is
unanimous
The Influence of Others

Obedience Studies
 Milgram- 60% of participants obeyed and
delivered all the possible shocks
○ Participants who could see the learners gave
fewer shocks that those who only could hear
the learners
○ When it was the assistant of
the experimenter giving the
orders, obedience decreased
○ When other confederates in the
room disagreed, obedience
decreased
Group Dynamics
Norms- rules about how group members
should act
 Roles- exist within groups
 Social Loafing- individuals do not put in
as much effort when acting as
part of the group as they do
when acting alone

Group Dynamics

Group polarization- the tendency of a
group to make more extreme decisions
than the group members would make
individually
 Discussion matters- exposed to new
persuasive arguments

Groupthink- the tendency for some
groups to make bad decisions
 Group members suppress their resignations
Group Dynamics

Deindividuation- the loss of restrain that
occurs when group members feel
anonymous and aroused
 Looting, rioting
 Zimbardo’s Prison Study- students took to
their assigned roles so well that the
study had to be ended early
Practice Questions

1) Which of the following suggestions is
most likely to reduce the hostility felt
between antagonistic groups?
 Force the groups to spend a lot of time together
 Encourage the groups to avoid each other as
much as possible
 Give the groups a task that cannot be solved
unless they work together
 Set up a program in which speakers attempt to
persuade the groups to get along
 Punish the groups whenever they treat each
other badly

2) On Monday, Tanya asked her teacher to
postpone Tuesday’s test until Friday. After
her teacher flatly refused, Tanya asked the
teacher to push the task back one day, to
Wednesday. Tanya is using the
compliance strategy of

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

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Foot in the door
Norms of reciprocity
Compromise
Strategic bargaining
Door in the face

3) In the Milgram studies, the dependent
variable was
 The highest level of shock supposedly


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administered
The location of the learner
The length of time
The number of people in the group
The instructions given by the experimenter

4) Your new neighbor seems to know
everything about ancient Greece that your
social studies teacher says during the first
week of school. You conclude that she is
brilliant. You do not consider that she might
already have learned about ancient Greece in
her old school. You are evidencing

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The self-fulfilling prophecy effect
Pluralistic ignorance
Confirmation bias
The fundamental attribution error
Cognitive dissonance

5) Janine has always hated the color orange.
However, once she became a student at
Princeton, she began to wear a lot or orange
Princeton tiger clothing. The discomfort
caused by her long-standing dislike of the
color orange and the current ownership of so
much orange and black striped clothing is
known as
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Cognitive dissonance
Contradictory concepts
Conflicting motives
Opposing cognitions
Inconsistent ideas

6) When Pasquale had his first oboe solo
in the orchestra concert, his performance
was far worse than it was when he
rehearsed it at home. A phenomenon that
helps explain Pasquale’s poor performance
is known as

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Social loafing
Groupthink
Deindividuation
Social impairment
Diffusion of responsibity

7) After your school’s football team has a
big win, students in the halls can be heard
saying, “We are awesome.” The next
week, after the team loses to the last place
team I the league, the same students
lament that “THEY were terrible”. The
differences in these comments illustrates

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The fundamental attribution error
Self-serving bias
The self-fulfilling prophecy effect
The false consensus effect
Conformity

8) Which of the following is the best
example of prejudice?
 Billy will not let the girls play on his hockey

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team.
Santiago dislikes cheerleaders.
Athena says that she can run faster than
anybody on the playground.
Mr. Tamp calls on boys more than girls.
Ginny thinks that all Asians are smart.