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WHS AP Psychology
Unit 12: Social Pyschology
Essential Task 12-2: Discuss attitude formation
and how attitudes change with specific
attention to schema, primacy effect, cognitive
dissonance and the central and peripheral
routes to persuasion.
Fundamental
Attribution
Error
Self-Serving
Bias
Attribution
Just-World
Hypothesis
We are
here
Individualistic
vs.
Collectivistic
Culture
Cognitive
Dissonance
Attitudes
and
Persuasion
Routes to
Persuasion
Unit 12:
Social
Psychology
Impact
of Others
on You
Conformity
Schema
Attraction
InGroup/OutGroup
Group
Behavior
Compliance
Group
Polarization
Group
Think
Social Cognition: How you think
about people?
Impression Formation – how do you construct
your social cognition?
1. Primacy effect
•Early information about someone
weighs more than later information in
forming impressions
•We are “cognitive misers”
Impression Formation
2. 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
• Randomly identified “bloomers” made greater gains
• (Snyder, Tanke & Berscheid, 1977)
• Attractiveness Stereotype – sociability and socially savy
• Men received “background” information about a woman
they were about to talk with on a phone, info included a
photo. Women received same info, but no photo.
• IV: Photo of woman either attractive or unattractive
• DVs: 1) Men’s expectations about the woman 2)
Observers’ ratings of the woman’s behavior
• Results: When men expected that the woman was
attractive, she was judged as friendly, warm, and more
animated than when men believed they were talking with
an unattractive woman. (self-fulfilling prophecy)
Impression Formation
3. 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
4. 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
Attitudes
• 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.
Democratic leaders supported Bush’s attack
on Iraq under public pressure. However,
they had their private reservations.
Attitude Change
• Process of persuasion
– Must get and maintain the person’s
attention (Sex and humor and sex and
then some more funny sex)
– Must comprehend the message
– Comprehension leads to acceptance
Attitude Change
• Communication model – how the
message gets comprehended and then
accepted
– 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.
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
• Foot-in-the-door effect: Small request. Large
request
• Lowball procedure: commitment
• Door-in-the-face effect: Deny large to get small.
• Social Facilitation : Stronger responses on simple
or well learned tasks in the presence of others
• Social Loafing is the tendency for people in a
group to exert less effect when pooling their
effort towards attaining a common goal.
– GROUP PROJECTS (there’s always at least one lazy jerk
who doesn’t do anything!)
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 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:
Resolution of Cognitive Dissoance
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 of both of the
sides
–
The person I gossiped with won’t really tell that
many people.