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attitude
An evaluation of the social world
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three components of an attitude
- - affect (feelings)
- - behavior (inclination to act)
- - cognitions (beliefs, thoughts)
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when do attitudes predict behavior most accurately
when the attitude is specific
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when are you more likely to act on something
when you have a vested interest (changing legal drinking age)
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self-perception theory
- we infer our attitudes from our behaviors
- ex. do i like green? most of my clothes are and so is my couch... i guess so
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Chaiken and Baldwin (1981)
- participants had consistent or inconsistent environmental views
- conclusion: participants who had inconsistent views were more likely to change their views based on their responses
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cognitive dissonance theory
- "the motive to reduce inconsistencies in cognitions"
- a feeling of discomfort caused by performing an action that is inconsistent with one's attitudes
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dissonance between behavior and a belief
- - cognition about a behavior: I smoke
- - cognition about an attitude: smoking is dangerous
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how do you get rid of dissonance
- 1. change cognition about behavior
- 2. change cognition about attitude
- 3. add consonant cognitions
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insufficient justification
- "changing attitudes to justify unrewarding actions"
- getting someone to do something they don't want to do for no reason at all
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insufficient justification with getting paid $20 for boring task vs. getting paid $1
- when paid $20, task was said to be boring
- when paid $1, task was sad to be fun
- conclusion: we change attitudes to justify unrewarded actions
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effort justification
- "changing attitudes to justify effortful actions"
- when effort is exerted, people change their attitudes to "justify" that effort
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decision justification
- "changing attitudes to justify past decisions"
- more certain about something after they have committed to it
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social cognition
- how we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world
- ways of managing "social data"
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three areas of research
- schemas
- heuristics
- atrrributions
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schemas
mental structures that allow us to organize information in an efficient manner
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heuristics
shortcuts and strategies we use in order to make sense out of the social world
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attributions
how we make judgments about behaviors
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why use schemas
- focus attention and memory
- helps "go beyond the data"
- guides affect
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schema based distortions
- misremembering - seeing things that are not there
- first impressions - the primary effect
- polarization - biases that exist in your mind
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'hostile media phenomenon"
two sides read article, each one thinks it is anti-their side
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self-fulfilling prophecies
- we can make our schemas come true based on our behavior
- have an expectation about a person or situation
- this expectation influences how you act
- ex. children who were told they had potential to have higher IQ, did at end of year then those who did not
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availability heuristic
- basing a decision on the ease of thinking
- it is easier to think of airplane crashes than car accidents, so we think we are much more likely to due in a plane crash
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self-judgments and availability
- (easy) think of 6 times you were assertive
- (hard) think of 12 times you were assertive
- when it is easy to think of times you were assertive, you think you are assertive and vice versa
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repressiveness heuristic
- basing a judgment on "typically" or resemblance
- blonde student with dark tan and mellow personality who likes to go to the beach - is he from california?
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shortcomings of representativeness
- people tend to put too much weight on typicality
- ignore more "diagnostic" information
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anchoring
- answer depends on how the question is asked
- - is the population over 100,0000
- - is the population under 1,000,000
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attribution theory
- a description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behavior
- negative events lead to a much greater search for reasons than positive events
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why are attributions important
- different attributions cause you to draw different conclusions
- man pushing women in front of library - is it playful or aggression and should they assume they are dating or call the cops
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locus of causality
most important judgment is what the cause is
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internal attribution (person attribution)
cause is internal to the person, such as personality traits, moods, abilities, efforts, or attitudes
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external attribution (situational attribution)
cause is external to the person, such as actions of others, nature of the situation, or luck
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how we determine attribtions
- actual cause is unimportant in making attributions, what we think determines our actions
- primarily interested in when people make an dispositional attribution or an external attribution
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covariation model
- distinctiveness (person's behavior unique to that situation)
- consistency (person's behavior stable across situations)
- consensus (would other people do the same thing in the same situation)
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fundamental attribution error
- tendency to attribute other's behavior to corresponding dispositions
- behavior reveals dispositions
- a failure to discount situational causes
- ex. when you raise your hand if you are given 5 extra pts to say you want the drinking age to be 25, people tend to think you actually want the drinking age to be 25
- we should not draw a correspondent inference from the behavior but we tend to
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Jones and Harris (1967)
- people read a positive article about Castro and half were told the author did it by free will and other half told author had no choice
- the people who were told the author had no choice still thought that those were the authors views
- fundamental attribution error
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self-serving bias
- good dispositions, bad situations
- take credit for positive behaviors/outcomes
- blame negative behaviors/outcomes on external factors
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