Social Psychology Chapter 4 PDF

Chapter 4 - Social Psych Attitudes - are feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond favorably or unfavorably to objects, people, and events. Example: A person may have a negative attitude (feeling) toward coffee, a neutral attitude (feeling) toward the French, and a p...

Chapter 4 - Social Psych Attitudes - are feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond favorably or unfavorably to objects, people, and events. Example: A person may have a negative attitude (feeling) toward coffee, a neutral attitude (feeling) toward the French, and a positive attitude (feeling) toward the next-door neighbor. 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 (having great influence or power). Unlike a doctor measuring heart rate, social psychologists never get a direct reading on attitudes. Rather, we measure expressed attitudes. Like other behaviors, expressions are subject to outside influences. Today’s social psychologists have some clever means at their disposal for minimizing social influences on people’s attitude reports. Some of these are measures of implicit (unconscious) attitudes. Role Playing In one famous but controversial study, college men volunteered to spend time in a simulated prison constructed in Stanford’s psychology department by Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo wanted to find out: Is prison brutality a product of evil prisoners and malicious guards? Or do the institutional roles of guard and prisoner embitter and harden even compassionate people? Do the people make the place violent, or does the place make the people violent? By a flip of a coin, Zimbardo designated some students as guards. He gave them uniforms, billy clubs, and whistles and instructed them to enforce the rules. The other half, the prisoners, were picked up by the police at their homes and then locked in cells and made to wear humiliating hospital-gown-like outfits. After a jovial first day of “playing” their roles, the guards and the prisoners, and even the experimenters, got caught up in the situation. The guards began to disparage the prisoners and reinforced cruel and degrading routines. The prisoners broke down, rebelled, or became apathetic. There developed, reported Zimbardo (1972), a “growing confusion between reality and illusion, between roleplaying and self-identity.... This prison that we had created... was absorbing us as creatures of its own reality.” Implicit attitudes - our often unacknowledged inner beliefs that may or may not correspond to our explicit (conscious) attitudes. The most widely used measure of implicit attitudes is the implicit association test (IAT). Implicit association test (IAT) - a computer-driven assessment of implicit attitudes. The test uses reaction times to measure people’s automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words. Easier pairings (and faster responses) are taken to indicate stronger unconscious associations. Example: One can measure implicit racial attitudes by assessing whether white people take longer to associate positive words with Black faces than with white faces. Principle of aggregation - the effects of an attitude become more apparent when we look at a person’s aggregate or average behavior. Example: People’s general attitude toward religion doesn’t do a very good job at predicting whether they will go to religious services during the coming week, probably because attendance is also influenced by the weather, the religious leader, how one is feeling, and so forth. But religious attitudes predict the total quantity of religious behaviors over time across many situations’’. Better yet for predicting behavior, says Ajzen and Fishbein’s “theory of planned behavior,” is knowing people’s intended behaviors and their perceived self-efficacy and control (Figure 2). Even asking people about their intentions to engage in a behavior often increases its likelihood (Levav & Fitzsimons, 2006; Wood et al., 2016). ‘ Role - a set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave. We have seen that several streams of evidence merge to form a river: our behaviors influence our attitudes. Do these observations offer clues to why behavior affects attitude? Social psychology’s detectives suspect three possible sources: 1. Self-presentation theory assumes that for strategic reasons, we express attitudes that make us appear consistent. 2. Cognitive dissonance theory assumes that to reduce discomfort, we justify our actions to ourselves. 3. Self-perception theory assumes that our actions are self-revealing: when uncertain about our feelings or beliefs, we look to our behavior, much as anyone else would. It is the theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us — by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs. The foot-in-the door phenomenon - The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request. Low-ball technique - A tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who agree to an initial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante. People who receive only the request are less likely to comply with it. Cognitive Dissonance - is tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions. For example, dissonance may occur when we realize that we have, with little justification, acted contrary to our attitudes or made a decision favoring one alternative despite reasons favoring another. Selective exposure refers to the tendency to seek out information that confirms existing beliefs, while confirmation bias is the tendency Another way people minimize dissonance is through selective exposure. to overestimate the influence of confirming evidence and underestimate conflicting evidence. Selective exposure - the tendency to seek information and media that agree with one’s views and to avoid dissonant information. Insufficient justification - reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s behavior when external justification is “insufficient.” Facial feedback effect - the tendency of facial expressions to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness. Imagine being a parent who wants your child to enjoy reading. What if you paid $10 for every book your child read? Would she then learn to love reading? Maybe not. The incentive might get the child to read more, but it may also lead her to think she’s reading only to get the money and not because she enjoys the activity. Rewarding people for doing what they already enjoy may lead them to attribute their action to the reward. If so, this would undermine their self-perception that they do it because they like it. Thus, the extrinsic (or external) motivation of the reward can interfere with the intrinsic (or internal) motivation of true enjoyment in the activity. Overjustification effect - the result of bribing people to do what they already like doing; they may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing. The overjustification effect occurs when someone offers an unnecessary reward beforehand in an obvious effort to control behavior. Example: Pay people for playing with puzzles, and they will later play with the puzzles less than those who played for no pay. Promise children a reward for doing what they intrinsically enjoy (for example, playing with markers), and you will turn their play into work (Figure 6). Give even very young children (20 months old) a reward for helping, and they will be less likely to help later. Self-affirmation theory - a theory that (a) people often experience a self-image threat after engaging in an undesirable behavior; and (b) they can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self. Threaten people’s self-concept in one domain, and they will compensate either by refocusing or by doing good deeds in some other domain.