Download Snímek 1

Social psychology:
Attitudes, social cognition
16th November 2007
Social psychology

Study how people’s thoughts,
feelings and actions are affected by
others
Attitudes


Learned predispositions to respond in
a favorable or unfavorable manner to
a particular person, behavior, belief
or thing.
ABC model of attitudes
• Affect component
• Behavior component
• Cognition component
Do you like oranges?
What do you think about oranges?



A: I like them. I
like the taste…
B: I try to eat at
least one daily…
C: Oranges are
healthy, contains
lot of vitamin C…
Forming and maintaining attitudes

Classical conditioning
Forming and maintaining attitudes

Operant conditioning
• Can we maintain attitude others don’t
share?

Observational learning
• Children pick up prejudices of their
parents…
• Learning attitudes through media
Persuasion: changing attitudes
Message
source
Attractiveness
Expertise
Trustworthiness
Recipient
(target)
of message
Central versus
peripheral
route processing
Message
characteristics
One sided
versus two
sided arguments
Fear producing
Message source: attitude
communicator

Greatest attitude change:
• physical and social attractiveness
• expertise and trustworthiness
The message



One sided
arguments
Two sided
arguments
Fear producing
messages
Characteristics of the recipient





intelligence???
gender differences???
central route processing (careful
perceiving, thinking about the content)
peripheral route processing (other
factors than content)
age, race, religion, income, marital
status…
Attitudes and behavior


consistency between attitudes and
behavior is likely
people tend to be consistent in
different attitudes they hold
• liberalism
• vegetarianism…
How our behavior shapes our
attitudes

Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive
dissonance
• the conflict that arises when a person
holds contradictory cognitions
• this dissonance must be reduced
• can be done by changing attitudes
Two contradictory cognitions
1. “I smoke.”
2. “Smoking leads to cancer.”
Dissonance
Modifying
one or both
cognitions
(“I really
don’t smoke
too much”)
Changing
perceived
importance of
one cognition
(“The evidence
is weak that
smoking causes
cancer”)
Adding
additional
cognitions
(“I exercise so
much that it
doesn’t matter
that I smoke”)
Denying that
cognitions are
related
(“There is no
evidence linking
smoking
and cancer”)
Social cognition
= How people understand others

What other people are like…
• Schemas about people and social
experiences

Impression formation
• Central traits





What have you
mentioned at first
glimps?
How do you feel
about him?
Why is he so
fed-up?
Is he good
goalkeeper?
What you don’t
like about him?
Attribution process
1.
Why is he so fed-up?
Is the cause situational or
dispositional?

Biases in attribution:

• Fundamental attribution error
• Hallo effect
• Assumed similarity bias
Thank you for your
attention!