Social psychology: Attitudes, social cognition

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Social psychologyAttitudes, social cognition

• 16th November 2007

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Social psychology

• Study how peoples thoughts, feelings and actions
  are affected by others

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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

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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

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Forming and maintaining attitudes

• Classical conditioning

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Forming and maintaining attitudes

• Operant conditioning
• Can we maintain attitude others dont share?
• Observational learning
• Children pick up prejudices of their parents
• Learning attitudes through media

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Persuasion changing attitudes
Recipient (target) of message
Message source
Message characteristics
One sided versus two sided arguments Fear
producing
Central versus peripheral route processing
Attractiveness Expertise Trustworthiness
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Message source attitude communicator

• Greatest attitude change
• physical and social attractiveness
• expertise and trustworthiness

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The message

• One sided arguments
• Two sided arguments
• Fear producing messages

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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

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Attitudes and behavior

• consistency between attitudes and behavior is
  likely
• people tend to be consistent in different
  attitudes they hold
• liberalism
• vegetarianism

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How our behavior shapes our attitudes

• Leon Festingers 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

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Two contradictory cognitions 1. I smoke. 2.
Smoking leads to cancer.
Dissonance
Modifying one or both cognitions (I really dont
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 doesnt matter that I smoke)
Denying that cognitions are related (There is
no evidence linking smoking and cancer)
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Social cognition

• How people understand others
• What other people are like
• Schemas about people and social experiences
• Impression formation
• Central traits

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• 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 dont like about him?

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Attribution process

• Why is he so fed-up?
• Is the cause situational or dispositional?
• Biases in attribution
• Fundamental attribution error
• Hallo effect
• Assumed similarity bias

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Thank you for your attention!