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PSYCHOLOGY
Third Edition
by
Drew Westen
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C h a p t e r 17
ATTITUDES & SOCIAL
COG NITION
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Lecture Outline
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Attitudes
Social Cognition
The Self
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Social Psychology
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Social psychology examines the influence
of social processes on the way people
think, feel, and behave
Examples of social psychology issues
include:
 Attitudes towards objects and people
• Importance in advertising
 Stereotypes about nations and people
 Knowledge of others and yourself
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Attitudes
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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”
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Attitudes vary in strength: refers to whether the
attitude is durable (long lasting) and whether the
attitude alters behavior
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Attitude Issues
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Attitude beliefs vary along several
dimensions:
 Specificity versus generality
 Complexity of the attitude can vary
 Interconnection with other attitudes
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Attitude evaluations also can vary in:
 Intensity: Refers to the strength of the
positive or negative impression
 Ambivalence: An attitude can be associated
with negative and positive valence
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Attitudes and Behavior
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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
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Why Would Behaviors Not be
Predicted by Attitudes?
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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 (automatic components) may
dominate, but are difficult to assess
© 2002 John Wiley & 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
© 2002 John Wiley & 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
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Behavioral Change
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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
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Cognitive Dissonance
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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
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Culture and Dissonance
Resolution
(Figure adapted from Heine & Lehman, 1997, p. 396)
© 2002 John Wiley & 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
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Issues in Social Cognition
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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.
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
First Impressions
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Is the person in paragraph A more friendly
than the person described in B?
(Figure adapted from Luchins, 1957, pp. 34-35)
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Social Schemas
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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
© 2002 John Wiley & 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
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Racism
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Racism reflects a negative attitude toward
members of a racial group
 Stereotype are the cognitive component
 Prejudice is the emotional component
 Discrimination is the behavioral component
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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
© 2002 John Wiley & 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
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Roots of Prejudice
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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
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Prejudice is functional?
 The notion that prejudice preserves the
interests of the dominant classes
• E.g. Apartheid in South Africa
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Inter-Group Hostility
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In-groups versus outgroup: 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
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Reducing intergroup hostility:
 Sherif’s study: reducing hostility requires contact
AND cooperation among the group members
© 2002 John Wiley & 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…”
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Issues in Attribution
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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
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Processes that Modulate Attribution
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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)
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Augmentation refers to an increase in an
internal attribution for certain behaviors
 Drunk driver who drank another beer shortly after
causing a fatal crash: His prison sentence = 202
years
© 2002 John Wiley & 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”
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The Self
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What is meant by the “self” is a source of
controversy
 William James:
• The self as subject includes your experience as a thinker,
feeler, and actor
• The self as object includes is your view of yourself
 Psychodynamic view includes emotional
components of the self (positive and negative)
 Cognitive psychology views the self as a schema
which may be hierarchically organized
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Hierarchy of the Self
(Figure adapted from Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1983)
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright
Copyright 2002 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 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.
© 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.