Lecture notes
Lecture notes Introduction to Psychology
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- University Of The West Of England
Lecture notes for the whole first year module of Introduction to Psychology
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Intro to Psychology04/10/19 Attitudes and prejudice
What are attitudes?
A predisposition to evaluate some individuals, groups or objects in a particular way
Can be positive or negative.
“A relatively enduring organization of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards
socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols” (Hogg and Vaughan, 2005).
General evaluations of things that can bias us toward having a particular response to
it.
The ‘ABC’ of attitudes
Affective – feelings or emotions about a topic.
Behavioural – actions regarding the topic.
Cognitive – thoughts about the topic.
E.g.
Affective – fast food is disgusting. I hate the grease and the smell.
Behavioural – I organised a petition to oppose the building of a fast food chain in my town.
Cognitive – the easy availability of fast food discourages people to eat healthily.
Attitudes are functional.
Value-expressive function: enable us to express who we are and what we believe in.
Ego-defensive function: enable us to project internally-held conflicts onto others (e.g.
homophobia).
Knowledge function: enable us to know the world.
Utilitarian function: enable us to gain rewards and avoid punishment.
Cognitive consistency
People seek consistency among their attitudes and behaviour
Reconcile divergent attitudes-behaviours so that they appear rational and
consistent:
- They may alter an attitude or behaviour
- They may be developing a rationalisation for the discrepancy
- Avoiding cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive consistency
, In this experiment all participants were required to do what all would agree was a boring
task and then to tell another subject (who was actually a confederate of the experimenter)
that the task was exciting. Half of the subjects were paid $1 to do this and half were paid
$20 (quite a bit of money in the 1950s). Following this, all subjects were asked to rate how
much they liked the boring task. This latter measure served as the experimental
criterion/the dependent measure. According to behaviorist/reinforcement theory, those
who were paid $20 should like the task more because they would associate the payment
with the task. Cognitive dissonance theory, on the other hand, would predict that those who
were paid $1 would feel the most dissonance since they had to carry out a boring task and
lie to an experimenter, all for only 1$. This would create dissonance between the belief that
they were not stupid or evil, and the action which is that they carried out a boring tasked
and lied for only a dollar (see Figure 2). Therefore, dissonance theory would predict that
those in the $1 group would be more motivated to resolve their dissonance by
reconceptualizing/rationalizing their actions. They would form the belief that the boring task
was, in fact, pretty fun.
A socio-cognitive model
Attitudes have a cognitive representation
Attitudes serve to relate a person to the social world
They serve a social function rather than a cognitive consistency function.
Attitude is represented by:
- An object label and the rules for applying that label
- An evaluative summary of that object
- A knowledge structure supporting that evaluation.
E.g. Shark
- Label: big fish with large teeth
- Evaluative: frightening, best avoided when swimming
- Knowledge: threat to our physical well-being
Prejudice attitudes
Prejudice is a form of attitude bias.
Affective – Prejudice: strong feelings about the attitude object and the qualities it is believed
to possess
Behavioural – Discrimination: intentions to behave in certain ways towards the attitude
object
Cognitive – Stereotyping: beliefs about the attitude object that are reinforced overtime by
consistent societal views.
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