Week 5 Exam Notes - Attitudes, Schemas, Heuristics, and Behaviors PDF

**WEEK 5** **ATTITUDES, SCHEMAS, HEURISTICS AND BEHAVIOURS** - **Attitudes consist of 3 components C A B or ABC** 1. Cognitive thoughts and beliefs about a target 2. Affective emotions, feelings and reactions towards a target 3. Behaviour actions and observable behaviour toward a target -...

**WEEK 5** **ATTITUDES, SCHEMAS, HEURISTICS AND BEHAVIOURS** - **Attitudes consist of 3 components C A B or ABC** 1. Cognitive thoughts and beliefs about a target 2. Affective emotions, feelings and reactions towards a target 3. Behaviour actions and observable behaviour toward a target - **An attitude is:** an evaluation of people, objects and ideas - **2 Types of Attitudes** 1. **Explicit Attitudes** - We are aware of - Consciously endorsed - **Susceptible to social desirability bias:** we can lie to others about our thoughts feelings and behaviours to please others - In control of - We can share with others our attitudes - Introspection 2. **Implicit Attitudes** - Attitudes are less accessible to our conscious awareness - Less control over these attitudes - Less susceptibility to social desirability bias - Subconscious out of our awareness - Can't be controlled - Automatic - Can conflict with the explicit attitudes we hold - Are measured by reaction time and response - **Implicit Attitudes Test ITA** - Measure the speed at which we respond - Measures implicit attitudes outside our awareness - Validity: the ability of the measurement tool to measure what it says it is measuring is not effective. - It might just be measuring cultural associations on implicit attitudes - It may just be measuring the first thought that is conditioned into your mind, but not actually how to think today. - Reliability: when the ITA was retested it could not predict the same results, results were different every time. - If someone has English as a second language results varied In native tongue. - **From the ITA we have learned that the first thought we have is conditioned thought and the second thought we have defines who we are.** - **Implicit and Explicit Test By GAWRONSKI (2019):** - Looked at are people really aware of their own attitudes. - Found that people ARE aware and CAN access their own implicit atttitudes - Found a low correlation between implicit and explicit results because 1. Motivation and opportunity influence attitudes 2. Different content exists in our implicit and explicit attitudes 3. Participants can predict their own scores 4. We say we are aware of our own implicit attitudes - **Schema** - A schema is a mental representation of the various things we come across in our everyday life - A mental blueprint - A belief about how we expect something to be or behaviour - A script - Schemas reduce cognitive load and work - Schemas save time - Schemas allow us to go beyond the information we are given 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 - Rules of thumb for decision-making and judgments - Reduce problem-solving - Rule-based decisions - Form attitudes quickly - **Types of Heuristics** 1. **Representative Heuristics** - How similar it is to the category we already have - Does the example belong to a particular group based on our mental representation of the category? - Ignores base rate statistics and facts - This can lead to the wrong conclusion - It fits into the representation you already have in your mind Example: Claudette knows a chihuahua is a type of dog because it\'s similar to other types of dogs. 2. **Availability Heuristics** - Judges the likelihood of an event or the correctness of a hypothesis based on how easily the event comes to mind - The more common an event the easier it is for your brain to access - Gives a good approximation of frequency or correctness - Less reliable for infrequent but highly accessible events - The frequency of something tells us how likely we think it can happen - Events we hear about more often come to mind quicker and we assume its because it happens more often. - The more we hear about something the more common we think it is **SCHWARZ ET AL. (1991): Heuristics Assertive Vs non Assertive** - German female students - Recall words 6 examples - Recalls 12 examples - Results found the easier it is to recall information the more you believe it to be true. - The harder it is to come up with examples and recall them the less likely you are to believe it as true. - **Illusory Correlations in Heuristics** - Believing there is an association between two variables, events, actions or ideas when they are not associated - Believing two things are connected when they are not Example: Yui believes that people act more strange on full moons than other days. - **Two Types of Thinking** 1. **Cognitive Miser** - Reluctant to spend cognitive resources - Conserves cognitive resources ( doesn't use much energy ) - Avoids engaging in effortful thinking - Mental resources are highly limited - Uses schemas and Heuristics - Solves problems in the simplest way with no effort - Makes assumptions - Stereotypes - Automatic judgments and fast decisions Example: A way of processing information and making decisions which conserves cognitive resources by relying on heuristics and schema. 2. **Naïve Scientist** - Looks for clear and reasonable explanations of what is happening in the world - Approaches each situation on individual basis - Analyses everything before making decisions - Looks for evidence - Uses cognitive resources - Flexible thinking - Spends time thinking to make wise decisions - **The Motivational Tactician Framework** - Tell us how we pick cognitive miser or Naïve scientist approach when thinking - Based on: 1. **Time we take before responding to think things through** 2. **The cognitive resources and information we use to provide us with an educated decision** 3. **Is the decision an important one?** - **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 - When things go wrong we either blame external things or internal things - **Actor-Observer Bias ( attribution bias 1 )** - We make **external/ situational attributions** for our **own** behaviour: because we have more information about ourselves and we want to maintain a positive self-image - We make **internal/ dispositional** attributions for **others'** behaviour - **2. Self-Serving Bias ( Attribution style 2)** - We make attributions that support a positive view of ourselves - When good things happen we make positive self-internal attributions - When bad things happen we blame the outside world and others and make negative external attributions. - We want to make ourselves look better - A bad mark on the test: external reason or attribution - Good mark on the test: we make internal attributions to reinforce our self-esteem - Children and older people have a larger self-serving bias compared to middle-aged groups - Children and older people have internal attributions about good things that happen and external attributions about bad things that happen - Cultural differences: USA, China and Korea, have the highest self-serving biases - Psychopathology: Anxiety and Depression, blame themselves when things go wrong, and when things go right they see It as external and having nothing to do with them. **ATTRIBUTIONS Self-Serving Bias Study 2** **3 HUA & TAN (2012): Olympic Games** - TV and Newspaper reports from gold medal winners about the reason they won - Western Cultures: Winning gold medal contribute success to internal dispositional self-construals about their abilities - Non-Western cultures: attributed their gold medal to external or situational construal. - **Where do attributes come from**  - **Attitudes can be implicit**: we are not aware of the things that are shaping our attitudes - **Attitudes can be explicit**: we are aware of what is shaping them - **Genes and Atttitudes** - **EAVES & HATEMI (2008): Twins or relative Study on Gay Rights and Abortions and Genetics** - Social learning from your parents only plays a very small role in the development of attitudes - Genetics plays a role in attitudes towards 1. Abortion 2. Gay rights 3. Death penalty 4. Jazz music 5. Censorship 6. Divorce 7. Political attitudes 8. Religion importance - Attitudes are influenced by genetic factors like personality traits or physical attributes. - **Attitudes and Social Learning Theory** - Bandura's social learning theory - New behaviours can be acquired by observing and imitating others - Children learn behaviours by observing others - **Attitudes and Classical Conditioning** - A stimulus that elicits an emotional response is paired with a neutral stimuli - Eventually, the neutral stimuli elicit the emotional response by itself **OLSON & FAZIO (2001): Classical conditions to hold certain attitudes** - Positive or negative stimuli can change attitudes - Classical conditioning can change explicit attitudes without people being aware of what is happening - Pairing something positive with a stimulus changes the positive attitude related to that stimuli also. - **Attitudes and Operant Conditioning** - Behaviour that is rewarded becomes more frequent - Behaviour that is punished becomes less frequent - **Attitudes and Experiences** - **Direct experience or mere exposure** 1. Can change a preference or positive attitude towards something 2. Can take place without conscious awareness 3. Exposure to novel things at first elicits fear or avoidance 4. Subsequent exposure causes less fear and more interest in new things 5. Repeated exposure increases **perceptual fluency** which is how good we are at perceiving an object. 6. You can't know something till you try it 7. The more exposure you have to something to greater the positive feelings have hae towards it, and the more positive attitude you have about it 8. The more exposure the less fear, unless it hurts us during exposure ORIGIN OF ATTITUDES - EXPERIENCE **1.ZAJONC (1968): Foreign Word Exposure Through Experience** - 7-letter Asian words - Great exposure to a new word the more it was associated with a positive happy meaning **2 MORGENSTERN ET AL. (2013): Cigarette ADD** - We have an increased like of things we are exposed to more often - The more they saw the cigarette ad the more they liked it - **3 Self-Perception Theories** - We infer our attitudes and feelings by observing our own behaviour in a situation in which it occurs - If we don't know how we feel about something we look towards our behaviour to tell us our attitude towards it  - **Cognitive Dissonance** - The feeling of discomfort caused by holding two or more inconsistent cognitions or thoughts - When we perform a behaviour that is discrepant from one's self-conception - We want to keep a positive self-image, so we distance ourselves from friends who we cant outperform or sabotage them - **Things we can do when we have cognitive Dissonance** - Change behaviour TO MATCH COGITIONS - Change cognitions; TO MATCH BEHAVIOUR - Add new cognitions: TO JUSTIFY OUR BEHAVIOUR - Sometime our behaviour at different from our thoughts and our attidueds become in conflict - When we have to choose between two alternative we face cognitive dissonance - We are pressured to reduce this feeling - Our behaviours by making a choice strengthen the cognitions from the behaviour choice **BREHM (1956): Cognitive Dissonance and behaviour** - After we select out of two difficult choices the choice we select goes up in desirability and the choice we reject goes down in desirability - Our actions by choosing change our thoughts about the desirability of the choices, to confirm we made the right choice (Mills, 1958) - Behaviours can strengthen the cognitions that lead to them. - Cheating on the exam, say its okay after you cheat and its okay for others to cheat now also. - (Aronson & Mills, 1959) - College students "boring discussion groups" - Our behaviour can change our cognitions to justify our actions - **We justify our own actions**