Attitudes and Behavior PDF

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR Part I. Explaining Attitudes In social psychology, attitudes are defined as beliefs and feelings related to a person or an event. It is a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone (often rooted in one’s beliefs, and exhibited in one’s feelings a...

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR Part I. Explaining Attitudes In social psychology, attitudes are defined as beliefs and feelings related to a person or an event. It is a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone (often rooted in one’s beliefs, and exhibited in one’s feelings and intended behavior). How do you feel about racism? What are your preconceived notions about people in poverty? Do you identify as a feminist or advocate for the LGBTQ? Your answers to these questions are part of your own personal attitudes. Every attitude has three components that are represented in what is called the ABC model of attitudes: A for affective, B for behavioral, and C for cognitive. The affective component refers to the emotional reaction one has toward an attitude object. For example, does seeing particular posts on Facebook make you feel angry or extremely sad? The next component of an attitude is the behavioral component, and it refers to the way one behaves when exposed to an attitude object. In the cognitive component, we form thoughts and beliefs towards the object. However, surprisingly studies have shown that people’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted their varying behaviors. For example, students who claimed to have negative attitude towards cheating still had the same likelihood of actually cheating than those who were more neutral about the topic. Attitudes toward the church were only modestly linked with weekly worship attendance. The disjuncture between attitudes and actions is what is called “moral hypocrisy”, appearing moral while avoiding the costs of being so. In other words, these are when people like to present their attitudes as morally correct but are not really willing to make the sacrifices to follow through. An experiment presented people with an appealing or fun task with possible prize money involved and a dull task with no rewards. The participants had to do one of the tasks and assign a supposed second participant to the other. Only 1 in 20 believed that assigning the appealing task with the reward to themselves was the right thing to do, yet 80 percent of the participants assigned the more fun task to themselves. Alongside several similar studies it shows that when morality and greed were put on a collision course, greed usually won. Any politicians come to mind? On that note, when faced with these types of contradictions, we turn to the theory of cognitive dissonance. We feel tension, or “dissonance”, when two of our thoughts or beliefs (“cognitions”) are inconsistent. Leon Festinger argued that to reduce this unpleasant arousal, we often adjust our thinking. Think back on the activity on discovering your attitudes. Your justifications (Part III), should there be any are your adjustments to accommodate your cognitive dissonance. Festinger and his collaborators read a news report of a UFO cult’s expecting to be rescued by flying saucers from a cataclysmic flood anticipated on December 21, 1954. As December 21 approached, the most devoted followers quit their jobs and disposed of their possessions, with some even leaving their spouses. When December 21st passed uneventfully, the group coped with its massive dissonance not by abandoning their beliefs, but with increased fervor. Their faithfulness had, they decided, persuaded God to spare the world—a message they now proclaimed boldly. Another way people minimize dissonance, Festinger believed, is through selective exposure to agreeable information. This is the tendency to seek information and media that agree with one’s views and to avoid dissonant information. Basically, people tend to prefer news that affirms us over news that informs us. Part II. Predictability of Attitude on Behavior The reason why our behavior and our expressed attitudes differ is that both are subject to many other influences. Our attitudes do predict our behavior when these other influences on what we say and do are minimal, when the attitude is specific to the behavior, and when the attitude is potent. On any occasion, it’s not only our inner attitudes that guide us but also the situation. Averaging enables us to detect more clearly the impact of our attitudes The Principle of Aggregation - Effects of an attitude become more apparent when we look at a person’s aggregate or average behavior instead of isolated acts. Aggregation is the process of adding up, or averaging, several single observations, resulting in a better (i.e., more reliable) measure of a personality trait than a single observation of behavior Theory of Planned Behavior - Knowing people’s intended behaviors and their perceived self- efficacy and control. Several dozen experimental tests confirm that inducing new intentions induces new behavior. Ask people if they intend to floss their teeth in the next two weeks, and they will become more likely to do so. Thus, we can confer that specific, relevant attitudes do predict intended and actual behavior. For example, attitudes toward recycling (but not general attitudes toward environmental issues) predict intention to recycle, which predicts actual recycling. A practical lesson: To change habits through persuasion, we must alter people’s attitudes toward specific practices. Part III. Role Playing When enacting new social roles, we may at first feel phony. But our unease seldom lasts. Think of a time when you stepped into some new role, perhaps your first days on a job or at college. That first week on campus, for example, you may have been supersensitive to your new social situation and tried valiantly to act mature and to suppress your high school behavior. At such times you may have felt self- conscious. You observed your new speech and actions because they weren’t natural to you. Then something amazing happened: Your pseudo- intellectual talk no longer felt forced. The role began to fit comfortably. Stanford Prison Experiment Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison. He advertised asking for volunteers to participate in a study of the psychological effects of prison life. 24 men judged to be the most physically & mentally stable, the most mature, and the least involved in antisocial behaviors were chosen to participate. The participants did not know each other prior to the study and were paid 15 dollars per day to take part in the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to either the role of prisoner or guard in a simulated prison environment. Prisoners were treated like every other criminal, being arrested at their own homes, without warning, and taken to the local police station. Then they were blindfolded and driven to the psychology department of Stanford University, where Zimbardo had had the basement set out as a prison, with barred doors and windows, bare walls and small cells. When the prisoners arrived at the prison, they were stripped naked, deloused, had all their personal possessions removed and locked away, and were given prison clothes and bedding. They were issued a uniform, and referred to by their number only. Guards were instructed to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners. No physical violence was permitted. Within hours of beginning the experiment some guards began to harass prisoners. The prisoners soon adopted prisoner-like behavior too. They talked about prison issues a great deal of the time. They started taking the prison rules very seriously. The prisoners were taunted with insults and petty orders, they were given pointless and boring tasks to accomplish, and they were generally dehumanized.  During the second day of the experiment, the prisoners removed their stocking caps, ripped off their numbers, and barricaded themselves inside the cells by putting their beds against the door. The guards called in reinforcements. The guards retaliated by using a fire extinguisher which shot a stream of skin-chilling carbon dioxide, and they forced the prisoners away from the doors. Next, the guards broke into each cell, stripped the prisoners naked and took the beds out. After this, the guards generally began to harass and intimidate the prisoners. As the prisoners became more submissive, the guards became more aggressive and assertive. They demanded ever greater obedience from the prisoners. Zimbardo had intended that the experiment should run for two weeks, but on the sixth day it was terminated, due to the emotional breakdowns of prisoners, and excessive aggression of the guards. The Stanford Prison Experiment revealed how people will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped Part IV. Evil Acts Evil sometimes results from gradually escalating commitments. A trifling evil act erodes one’s moral sensitivity, making it easier to perform a worse act. For example, one white lie can easily lead to bigger and bigger lies and one instance of infidelity can turn into a full flung affair. To quote Lin Manuel’s song from the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, “I wish I could say that was last time. I said that last time, it became a past time”. Harmful acts change us in other ways, too. We tend not only to hurt those we dislike but also to dislike those we hurt. For instance, you engage in gossip about a classmate you don’t know that well but get roped in by your friends speaking ill about him/her. Later on, you may realize that you have come to dislike that person through the act of speaking badly about him/her. Actions and attitudes feed each other, sometimes to the point of moral numbness. The more one harms another and adjusts one’s attitudes, the easier it becomes to do harm. Conscience is corroded. Harmful acts shape the self, but so, thankfully, do moral acts. Our character is reflected in what we do when we think no one is looking. Moral action, especially when chosen rather than coerced, affects moral thinking. That might be why children who grew up in an overly strict and controlling environment become more rebellious later on in life.