Psychology Chapter on Attitudes

Attitudes

• Attitudes have three components: cognitive (thoughts), affective (feelings), and behavioral (actions).
• An attitude is an evaluation of people, objects, or ideas.
• Example: Behaviours: Pet the Puppy, Attitude Object: A puppy, Affect: Feeling of adorableness, Cognition: Belief of friendliness.

Types of Attitudes

• Explicit Attitudes: We are consciously aware of them, endorse them, and can be influenced by social desirability bias (lying to please others). We are in control and can share them with others and use introspection.
• Implicit Attitudes: Less accessible to conscious awareness, less control over them, and less susceptible to social desirability bias. They are a subconscious out of our awareness; we can't control them; they are automatic. They can conflict with explicit attitudes and are measured by reaction time and responses.
• Implicit Attitudes Test (IAT): Measures speed of response, measures implicit attitudes outside our awareness.
• Criticisms of the IAT: Validity issues, might just measure cultural associations and not actual attitudes. It might just be measuring the first thought that is conditioned into your mind but not actually reflecting how we think today; reliability issues, results vary with repeated testing.

Implicit and Explicit Test

• Study by Gawronski (2019) found people are aware and can access their implicit attitudes.
• There is low correlation between implicit and explicit attitudes because of motivation and opportunity influencing attitudes and different contents existing in both implicit and explicit attitudes.
• Participants can predict their own scores, and individuals claim to be aware of their implicit attitudes.

Schemas

• A schema is a mental representation of everyday things.
• Mental blueprint of how we expect things to be or behave.
• Scripts: Schemas that represent sequences of events (e.g., going to a restaurant).
• Schemas reduce cognitive load, save time, and allow us to go beyond the given information.
• Example: Feng Min knows she has to line up to order fast food because she's been to many fast food establishments before.

Heuristics

• Heuristics are mental shortcuts used in decision-making and judgments.
• Reduce problem-solving and form attitudes quickly.

Representative Heuristics

• How similar something is to a category we already have.
• Does an example belong to a particular group based on our mental representation of the category?
• Ignores base rate statistics and facts.

Availability Heuristics

• Judges the likelihood of something based on how easily it comes to mind.
• The more common an event is, the easier it is to think of.
• Less reliable for infrequent events.
• Example: Meg believes there are more school shootings in the United States than in China.

Schwarz et al. (1991) Heuristics Assertive vs. Non-Assertive

• German female students recalled words.
• Easier to recall information, more you believe it to be true.
• Challenging to recall information, less likely to believe it as true.
• Manipulation check confirmed the difficulty of recalling examples affected belief.

Illusory Correlations in Heuristics

• Believing there is an association between two things when there isn't; believing two things are connected when they are not.
• Example: Yui believes that people act more strangely on full moons than other days.

Two Types of Thinking

• Cognitive Miser: A way to process information and make decisions that conserve cognitive resources by using heuristics and schemas.
• Naïve Scientist: Clear and reasonable explanations of what is happening and approaches each situation individually; analysis of information and evidence with flexible thinking and spending time to make decisions.

Attitude 3 Attributions

• Attribution Theory: We like to know or attribute a course to why things occur; it's our beliefs about why things happen.
• Attribution Theory: People seek to know why things happen (events).
• Example: Bad mark on an assessment: I didn't study hard enough (external/situational). I'm not smart enough (internal/dispositional).

Attribution Errors

• Actor-Observer Bias: External attributions for our own behavior (more info), internal attributions for others' behavior (less info).
• Self-Serving Bias: Attributions to support a positive view of ourselves; good things are internal, bad things are external.

Attitude Origins

• Origin of Attitudes look to the source of attitudes; some sources include experiences, direct experience or mere exposure, social learning, genetics, attitudes and classical conditioning, attitudes and operant conditioning.
• Exposure to novel things initially produces fear but more exposure reduces it and fosters interest and greater positive attitudes.
• Social Learning Theory new behaviors can be acquired by observing and imitating others.
• Classical Conditioning stimulus that elicits emotion paired with a neutral stimulus, eventually neutral elicits emotion; positive or negative stimuli can change attitudes even without explicit awareness.
• Operant Conditioning rewarded behavior becomes more frequent, punished behavior less frequent.

Cognitive Dissonance

• Discomfort caused by holding two conflicting thoughts or behaviors.
• We resolve dissonance by: changing behavior, changing thoughts, adding new thoughts/justifications.
• Example: Cheating on an exam to justify behavior.