Attitude and Social Cognition (Free Access)

Attitudes

  • Attitudesare evaluation that are made of various aspects of a individuals environment and social world
    • Attitudes can range from favorable or unfavorable 
      • Depending on issues, ideas, objects, actions
    • Attitudes can be certain and sure or uncertain and unsure
    • Attitudes may be explicit attitudes or implicit
      • Explicit attitudes are conscious and reportable
      • Implicit attitudes are uncontrollable and usually not consciously accessible
        • Implicit attitudes are assessed using the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
  • Attitudes are important as theyaffect our behavior. 
    • Usually when attitudes are strong and accessible (explicit)
    • But implicit attitudes also have a role to play in determining behaviour
  • Attitude development:
    • Classical conditioning
    • Operant conditioning
    • Observational learning
  • Often attitudes and behaviours are not in sync with one another i.e. attitudes don’t fit with our behaviour or vice versa. This is known as Cognitive dissonance
    • Resolution occurs when either the attitude is changed or behaviour is in line with the attitude

Social Cognition

  • The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.
    • How we think about the social world
    • Attempts to understand it and ourselves
    • Our place in it

Methods used:

  • Heuristics
  • Schemas
  • Automatic processing
  • Controlled processing
  • Heuristics
    • Simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid manner and seemingly effortless manner.
    • Four types:
    • Representative
    • Availability
    • Anchoring
    • Status Quo
    • Why do we need/use these?
      • Information overload: demands placed on our cognitive system are greater than its capacity.
        • Stress increases incidence of information overload
      • Conditions of uncertainty
    • You meet someone new at a house party. He is dressed in a suit. His hair is neatly placed and is clean shaven. Talks effortlessly and can hold a conversation. You notice that he also has clean personal habits and is very gentlemanly in his manners. You enjoy his company but he leaves the party early as he has a meeting the next morning.
    • Later you realize you forgot to ask him about his profession. What could it be?
    • You meet your neighbor for the first time. You notice that she is dressed conservatively, is neat in her personal habits, has a very large library in her home, and seems very gentle and a little shy.
    • What could her profession be?
  • Representativeness Heuristic
    • Prototype comparisons: Summary of the common attributes possessed by members of a category.
    • Rule: The more a person resembles or matches a given group, the more likely she or he is to belong to that group.
    • Can these judgement be wrong?
    • Decisions or judgments based on representativeness tend to ignore base rates –  frequency with which given events or patterns occur in the total population.
    • Asians are less likely to be governed by representativeness heuristics compared to North Americans.
    • Is it safer to be in a Big SUV or a smaller, lighter car, in the event of an accident?
    • How often do you use your cell phone during class hours?
  • Availability Heuristic
    • A strategy for making judgements on the basis of how easily specific kinds of information can be brought to mind.
    • Ease and amount rules
    • Self relevant, personal familiarity and emotional judgments follow the ease rule
    • Amount rule is followed for when we have less information about a particular subject, or if the task is inherently difficult.
  • Anchoring and Adjustment
    • It involves the tendency to use a number of value as a starting point to which we then make adjustments
      • Usually takes place during times of uncertainty
      • We use something we know as a starting point
    • We stop as soon as a value we consider plausible is reached
      • To save “mental effort”
  • Status Quo
    • Belief that the Status quo is good because it has existed for a length of time and therefore must be of some use
      • Eg a product that has been in the market for a long time may be preferred over a new, better product
    • Study on chocolates (Eidelman, Pattershall, Crandall, 2010)
    • Uncertainty is again central to these decisions.
  • Schemas
    • Mental framework centering on a specific theme that helps us to organize information
    • Influences three processes:
      • Attention
      • Encoding
      • Retrieval
    • Attention: Act as filters: information consistent with them are more likely to be noticed. However, information that is starkly different is also noticed
      • More used when cognitive load is high
    • Encoding: Information consistent with schemas is encoded
      • Sharply different are also encoded, especially if they don’t agree with us
    • Retrieval: Retrieval of consistent information is higher.
      • However, it may simply be that people report things that are consistent with their schemas.
      • When corrected for this response tendency we notice that both inconsistent and consistent information are equally likely to be retrieved.
    • Priming: A situation that occurs when a stimuli or event increases the availability in memory or consciousness of specific type of information held in memory
    • Unpriming: Effects of the schemas tend to persist until they are somehow expressed in thought or behavior and only then do their effects decrease.
    • Perseverance effect: The tendency of schemas to remain unchanged even in the face of contradictory information
    • Effects of schemas: (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968): Teachers and student IQ
    • Automatic processing: occurs after extensive experience with a task or type of information, we reach a stage where we can perform the task or process the information in a seemingly effortless, automatic and nonconscious manner.
    • Controlled processing: occurs when a task or type of information requires systematic, logical and highly effortful manner of processing.
  • Social neuroscience: Remember the experiment on immediate judgement of individuals as good or bad?
    • If immediate judgement is made, amygdala is more responsible
    • If judgement are reserved and thought through it is due to the prefrontal cortex.
  • Cognitive dissonance argues that people become uncomfortable when they hold multiple conflicting opinions or behave in ways that conflict with their beliefs.

Prejudice and Discrimination

  • We make judgments about others based on their group membership. 
    • in-group are preferred
    • out-group are not as preferred
  • Stereotyping—beliefs about what members of a social group are like.
  • Prejudice —negative emotional responses or dislike based on group membership.
  • Discrimination—differential treatment based on group membership
  • (Study Tip: Stereotype is cognitive, Prejudice is emotional, Discrimination is behaviour)
    • Prejudice
      • Not personal
      • Belief about underlying essences of the group
        • Essences—usually attributed to biologically based features that distinguish one  group from another
          • Used as a justification for their differential treatment
      • some theorists have suggested that all prejudices are not the same
      • “Prejudice” is not a generic negative emotional response
        • Specific intergroup emotions including fear, anger, envy, guilt, or disgust are important
        • Discriminatory actions would be different depending on what emotion underlies prejudice 
        • E.g. Anger=direct harm, Pity/Guilt=avoidance 
      • Implicit prejudice- Links between group membership and trait associations or evaluations that the perceiver may be unaware of. 
        • They can be activated automatically based on the group membership of a target.
    • Methods to reduce Prejudice
      • Contact hypothesis: Constant engagement with out-group 
        • Change categorizations based on similarities
        • Supported by research
      • Recategorization: rethinking categorization based only on out-group measure
        • Shifts in the boundaries between our ingroup (“us”) and some outgroup (“them”)
      • Superordinate goals: goals that both groups need to reach for benefit
      • Guilt: people can feel collective guilt based on the actions of other members of their group
        • Can reduce racism

Impression Formation

  • Self-presentation refers to our wanting to present a desired image both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves).
  • In the unfamiliar situations, we are self-conscious of the impressions we are creating.
  • Preparing to have our photographs taken, we may try out different faces in a mirror.
  • Self presentation tactics
    • Ingratiation – making the other person like you by praising them
    • Self deprecating – imply that we are not as good as someone else—to communicate admiration or to simply lower the audience’s expectations of our abilities.
    • Self promotion- selling what we want to seem as
    • Self-verification perspective—the processes we use to lead others to agree with our own self-views—suggests that negotiation occurs with others to ensure they agree with our self-claims (Swann, 2005).

Attribution

  • Attribution theory – explaining the cause of one’s or others’ behaviour
    • 2 types
      • Dispositional attribution are based on to internal factors like personality, motivation
      • Personal attributions are explanations in terms of personal characteristics
      • Situational are external factors like environment, others’ influence
  • Locus of control
    • The belief individuals have of whether their behaviour is controlled by themselves or are external
    • Internally controlled motivators are better
  • Attribution errors
    • Fundamental Attribution Error
      •  Attribution of others’ behaviour as due to personal factors even in the presence of powerful situational factors
    • Self-serving bias
      • Acceptance of credit when successful
      • Blaming others when unsuccessful
  • Attribution theory: A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behaviour.
  • Jones’s Correspondent Inference Theory – Edward Jones & Keith Davis (1965)—
    • This theory describes how we use others’ behaviour as a basis for inferring their disposition
    • The process of making an internal attribution.  T
    • Internal disposition are based on understand the link or correspondence between motive and behaviour. 
    • People make internal inferences based on three factors-
      • Persons’ degree of choice- free choice is indicative of internal disposition
      • Non common effects- effect that can be caused by one specific factor but not by others. 
        • Helps zoom in on a cause for others behaviour
      • Low social desirability- When individual’s behaviour doesn’t indicate socially desirability
  • Kelley’s covariance theory of attribution argued that people take three factors into account when making a personal vs. situational attribution:
    • Consensus:  the extent to which other people behave in the same way in a similar situation to the person in question. 
      • More people=higher consensus
    • Consistency:   the extent to which the person in question behaves this way every time the situation occurs at different times.
    • Distinctiveness:  the extent to which the person in question behaves in the same way to other situations.
      • If consistency is high, and distinctiveness and consensus are low, then a personal attribution is more likely: 
      • If consistency is high, and distinctiveness and consensus are also high, then a situational attribution is more likely.
Personal Attribution Situational Attribution
Consistency á Consistency á
Distinctiveness â Distinctiveness á
Consensus â Consensus á

Prosocial Behaviour 

  • Prosocial Behavior: behaviour that results in people helping others without immediate reward to themselves.
  • Empathy is the ability to share someone’s feelings and to understand them from there point of view
  • Components:
    • Emotional empathy- The ability to share others’ feelings
    • Empathic accuracy- The precision with which one perceives others’ feelings.
    • Empathic concern- Feelings of concern for another’s wellbeing.
  • Altruism is the ability to act selflessly for the benefit of others, without any apparent reward.
  • Motives for prosocial behaviour 
    • Empathy-Altruism hypothesis
    • Negative state relief model
    • Empathic joy
    • Kin Selection theory
    • Competitive altruism
    • Defensive helping
  • (Study Tip: NECKED)
    • Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis
      • The act of deriving pleasure from helping others, knowing that helping others would bring pleasure to oneself.
      • Leads to:
        • Empathetic accuracy
        • Popularity
        • Better friendships
        • More prosocial behavior
        • Better social adjustment
    • Negative state relief model
      • Individuals help others in order to reduce their own negative feelings.
    • Empathic Joy hypothesis
      • People show positive reaction when they receive help and this induces the positive feeling in the helper leading them to engage in greater prosocial behavior 
    • Kin Selection theory
      • You are more likely to help closer relatives than distant relatives or non relatives
      • You are more likely to help younger relatives than older relatives
        • Evolutionary basis
    • Reciprocal altruism
      • Helping non family members in the expectance of reciprocal help
    • Competitive altruism theory
      • It involves helping others to increase one’s own reputation or social status
    • Defensive helping
      • The help given to the members of out-groups to reduce the threat they pose to the status of the in-group
      • Creation of dependence