Understanding Social Behavior and Attitudes

• Social psychology explores behavior influenced by others and the environment.
• Attitudes are ways of thinking about specific topics and people.

Explaining Social Behavior

• Social psychology deals with all behavior in others' presence (actual, imagined, or implied).
• Social influences lead to views or attitudes that exist as behavioral tendencies.
• Studying social-cognitive processes and behavior is crucial to understand how the social context affects individuals.

Nature and Components of Attitudes

• Attitudes involve opinions on topics with varying importance and emotional impact.
• Attitudes combine thoughts with emotional and action components, exceeding mere opinions.
• An attitude is a mental state with a positive, negative, or neutral evaluation of a topic, accompanied by emotion and action tendency.
• The cognitive aspect is the thought component.
• The affective aspect is the emotional component.
• The behavioral (or conative) aspect is the tendency to act.
• A-B-C components (Affective-Behavioral-Cognitive components) consists of the three aspects.
• Attitudes are tendencies to behave in specific ways and remain unobservable, but part of cognition with emotional element.
• Beliefs are the cognitive foundations of attitudes.
• Values are attitudes or beliefs involving "should" or "ought," integral to one's outlook and hard to change.
• Attitudes provide a basis for making decisions.
• Valence (positivity or negativity) indicates if an attitude is positive or negative.
• Extremeness indicates how positive or negative an attitude is.
• Simplicity or Complexity (multiplexity) indicates the number of attitudes within a broader attitude.
• Centrality refers to the role of an attitude within the attitude system influencing other attitudes.

Attitude Formation

• Attitudes are learned with experience and interaction.
• Learning occurs through association, reward/punishment, modeling (observation), group/cultural norms, and information exposure

Factors Influencing Attitude Formation

• Family and School environment shapes early attitude formation through association, rewards, and modeling.
• Reference groups provide norms for behavior and thinking, reflecting group or cultural attitude learning.
• Personal experiences cause considerable change in attitudes.
• Media Related influences include technological advances in audio-visuals and the internet, used to strengthen cognitive and affective components of attitudes

Attitude Change

• Attitudes can change after formation, influenced by multiple factors.
• Attitudes that are still in the developing stage and are like opinions, are much more likely to change compared to attitudes that have become firmly established.

Process of Attitude Change:

• Balance: Fritz Heider's P-O-X triangle shows attitude relationships modify toward equilibrium.
• Cognitive Dissonance: Leon Festinger's theory emphasizes consistency, as dissonance leads to change.
• Two-Step Concept: S.M. Mohsin suggests source identification followed by behavioral change by the source leads to attitude change in target.

Factors Influencing Attitude Change

• Valence, extremeness, simplicity/complexity, and centrality determine attitude change.
• Source credibility, attractiveness, and message characteristics also affect attitude change.
• Qualities like persuadability, prejudices, self-esteem, and intelligence in the target influence attitude change.
• The method of spreading the message and how it is received may also influence change

Attitude-Behavior Relationship

• Consistency can depend on attitude strength, awareness, external pressures, observation, and expected consequences.
• Attitudes do not always predict/align to behavior.
• Sometimes behavior determines the attitude.

Prejudice and Discrimination

• Both involve attitudes toward a particular group.
• Prejudice usually involves a negative attitude and is based on sterotypes.
• Also involves discrimination, where groups receive less positive treatment.
• Discrimination are often based on race, social class or caste.

Sources of Prejudice :

• Learning: Influenced by family, reference groups, experiences, and that which reinforces prejudice.
• Strong Social Identity and Ingroup Bias : prejudice can be impacted by social identity
• Scapegoating: Group-based blame.
• Kernel of Truth Concept: Prejudice supported by perceived truth.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Target group confirms prejudice by behaving accordingly.

Strategies for handling prejudice

• Minimizing opportunities for learning prejudices.
• Changing such attitudes.
• De-emphasizing a narrow social identity based on the ingroup.
• Discouraging the tendency towards self-fulfilling prophecy among the victims of prejudice.
• Education, information dissemination, increasing intergroup contact, and highlighting individual identity prevent prejudice.

Explore how social psychology studies behavior influenced by others and the surrounding environment. Attitudes encompass various ways of thinking about specific topics and individuals, combining thoughts, emotions, and potential actions.