Psychology Lecture 11: Understanding Attitudes

Lecture 11: What is an attitude?

• An attitude is an expression of favor or disfavor toward a person, place, thing, or event.
• Gordon Allport termed it the "most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology."

Attitude Structure: ABC Model

• Affective component: A person's feelings or emotions about the attitude object (e.g., I crave chocolate).
• Behavioral (conative) component: How the attitude influences behavior (e.g., I will purchase a candy bar).
• Cognitive component: A person's beliefs or knowledge about an attitude object (e.g., I believe chocolate is unhealthy).

Attitude Strength: Strong vs. Weak

• Strong attitudes are resistant to change, stable over time, and influential on cognition and action.

Attitude Strength

• Attitude features related to attitude strength are discussed further in slides.

Attitude Functions

• Object-appraisal function: Helps make sense of the world.
• Instrumental function: Helps avoid pain and receive rewards.
• Value-expressive function: Demonstrates and maintains long-term standards and orientations.
• Social-adjustive function: Signals interpersonal priorities, sensitivity to others, and getting along with people.

Dual Process Model of Attitudes

• Explicit attitudes: Conscious and easy to report.
• Implicit attitudes: Automatic and leak out in behavior.

Attitude Assessment

• Self-report measures: Feeling thermometer, Likert scale.
• Advantages: Easy to measure, straightforward results, predict overt behavior.
• Disadvantages: Influenced by self-presentation concerns, might not pick up implicit attitudes.
• Behavioral measures: Implicit Association Test (IAT), Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP).
• Advantages: Assess implicit attitudes.
• Disadvantages: Hard to manipulate, merely assesses cultural beliefs, malleable.

Psychological Measures

• Skin conductance, cardiovascular measures, facial electromyography (EMG), electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Attitudes Predicting Judgments and Behavior

• Motivation and opportunities as determinants
• Low motivation and opportunity to deliberately think lead to judgments/behavior being influenced by automatic (implicit) attitudes.
• High motivation and opportunity to think lead to overriding automatic (implicit) attitudes

Persuasive Communication

• Chain of cognitive responses
• Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981, 1986)
• Details in slides.

Lecture 12: Historical Context

• Computers as inputs, outputs, and storage devices for processing and storing information.
• Emotions were not a focus of the original information processing approach.

Types of Affect

• Affect: Experience and expression of pleasantness/unpleasantness.
• Emotion: Affect triggered by an object (e.g., fear, sadness)
• Mood: A state of affect without a specific cause (e.g., feeling down)
• Note on feelings not requiring cognition (1923-2008): Mere exposure effect, emotions that aren't explicitly cognitive based

Discrete vs. Dimensional Models of Emotion

• Discrete emotions: Primary (basic) emotions (e.g., fear, happiness) felt by all animals, secondary emotions (complex).
• Dimensional models: Circumplex model of affect (Russell, 1980) with valence and arousal.

How can affect influence cognitions?

• Affect as Information (Schwarz & Clore, 1983) studied effect on cognition

Lecture 13: What is Impression Formation?

• Traits (dispositions) are distinguishing characteristics.
• Impression formation is the process of perceiving, organizing, and integrating information to form a unified impression.
• Is impression formation elemental or holistic? (example: with the attributes of Andy)

Holistic/Gestalt Perspective

• Visual perception (the color red against orange).
• Composite face task (Gestalt).
• Asch's (1946) study of impression formation
• Central traits: Traits that alter the impression created (e.g., warmth, intelligent)
• Primacy effect: First-learned traits exert greater influence on overall impression

Critiques of Asch

• Central vs peripheral traits
• Zanna & Hamilton study validating the elements of the study
• Warmth and Competence as universal dimensions
• Arguments that if traits are too correlated, perhaps there were other components in place that contributed to the overall impression, rather than just a perceived central trait.

Online vs. Memory-Based Judgements

• Online impressions vs memory-based impressions

Lecture 14: How does categorical info influence impressions?

• Continuum Model of Impression Formation (Fiske & Neuberg).
• Cognitive misers, stereotypes are schemas.
• Target categorization
• Allocating attention
• Cognitive assessment
• Further assessment of target

Lecture 15: How does Mind Perception Develop?

• Newborn observations on gaze and facial expressions
• Cognitive development and how mind perception develops

The "False Belief" Test: Theory of Mind

• Children's understanding if others have different beliefs.

Autism and Theory of Mind

• Discussion of differing abilities to understand beliefs in children with Autism.

Strategies for Mind Perception

• Projections (using own thoughts to understand others).
• Stereotyping (using categories to understand others).
• Dimensions of mind perception (Gray et al. 2007) - agency, experience, and capacity for pain.

Lecture 16: What is the Self?

• Internal attentional focus
• Mind wandering
• The homunculus
• Self concept
• Working self-concept
• Sensory memory
• Self schemas

Lecture 17: Need to Belong

• Sociometer theory- measuring how accepted we feel
• Social rejection
• Social relationships and wellbeing
• Loneliness

Lecture 18: Social Ecological Model

• Intrapersonal level
• Interpersonal level
• Institutional level
• Community level
• Systemic level
• Prejudice: An evaluation of someone or a group
• Stereotypes: Beliefs about groups
• Affect, cognition, and behavior.

Us vs. Them: The Minimal Group Paradigm

• Participant categorization and task evaluation.
• How judgments of ingroup and outgroup affect perception.

Stereotype Content

• Warmth and competence dimensions
• Stereotypes related to social groups, including disabled, older people, homeless, drug addicts, poor, middle-class, Christians, heterosexuals, Jews, and Asians.

Dehumanization and Infrahumanization

• Perceiving outgroups as lacking human qualities.

Lecture 19: Stereotype Formation

• How information processing biases (e.g., illusory correlation) contribute to stereotype formation.
• Learning and Cultural stereotypes.

The Persistence of Outgroup Negativity

• Fazio et al. (2004) study on bean tasting to predict outgroup negativity- Participants formed stereotypes based on past experiences even without sufficient information.

Lecture 20: Implicit vs. explicit bias, shooter bias

• Implicit and explicit racial biases
• Shooter bias experiment, and results

Lecture 21: How do close relationships influence us?

• Relational self, schemas
• Priming (Study), transference paradigm (Study).
• Derogation of attractive alternatives (Study)

Lecture 22: Attraction and Mate Selection

• Physical attractiveness (Halo Effect, Average Faces, WHR)
• Implicit and explicit attitudes

Reading Summary

• Notes about reading comprehension and key findings.

This quiz covers the essential concepts of attitudes, including their definitions, structure according to the ABC model, and the distinction between strong and weak attitudes. Explore how attitudes influence behavior and cognition, and learn about their various functions in social psychology.