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Summary Chapter 7: Attitudes, beliefs and consistency
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Chapter 7: Attitudes, beliefs and consistencyWhat are attitudes and why do people have them?
Attitudes can be important in that they predict behaviours.
Attitudes versus beliefs
Attitudes differ from beliefs.
Beliefs: are pieces of information (facts or opinions) about an object, person or issue.
Attitudes: are global evaluations toward some object or issue.
It has to do with liking.
It follows logically
Attitudes are for choosing, whereas beliefs are for explainin.
Beliefs and attitudes both serve interpersonal functions.
People need to influence how others choose and people also need to explain things to others.
Dual attitudes
Are defined as different evaluations of the same attitude object: an automatic attitude and a
deliberate attitude.
This dual model of attitudes fits the duplex-mind theme.
Automatic attitudes: are very fast evaluatice, ‘gut-level’ responses that people dont think a great
deal about.
Deliberate attitudes: reflective responses that people think more carefully about.
Sometimes automatic and deliberate attitudes are inconsistent.
Why people have attitudes
Attitudes are necessary and adaptive for humans. They help us adjust to new situations and to seek
those things in our environments that reward us and to avoid those things that punish us.
Attitudes can even be a matter of life or death, influencing wheter people take risks or not.
Attitudes are mainly used to sort things into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories, which are the most basic
categories of thought. (remember: bad is stronger than good)
As soon as you know what something is, you start to know whether you like or dislike it.
This initial evaluation is immediate and unconscious, occurring in the first microsecond of thought, it
even occurs for things people have never encountered before, such as nonsense words.
, People can easily override the initial, automatic evaluation with further thought, the initial
evaluation stands if no further thought is given.
People have attitudes about everything from politics to relationships and the economy.
Attitudes are helpful in making choices:
Without attitudes, you face a confusing range of options.
Possessing an attitude increases the ease, speed and quality of decision making.
How attitudes are formed
Formation of attitudes
(a) Mere exposure effect
Is the tendency for novel (unique or original) stimuli to be liked more after the
individual has been repeatedly exposed to them.
Social psychologist Robert Zajonc proposed that ‘mere repeated exposure of the
individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude
toward it’
Simply or just (merely) seeing something over and over again and nothing else is
enough to make you like it.
Mere exposure to more meaningful stimuli, such as the faces of people from
different races, can increase liking for similar faces never seen before.
This is also the principle on which much of the advertising industry is built.
The mere exposure effect can also influence attitude toward yourself.
Exceptions to this general rule that you will like something by simply being exposed
to it.
If you initially dislike something, being exposed to it repeatedly will not make you
like it more, it will make you like it less.
The same is true for threatening stimuli like angry faces, the more people are
exposed to them, the less they like them.
The mere exposure effect seems to be of great benefit to Facebook users. As they
use it more, they like it more. They also see more of their friends on it, which will
cause them to like those friends more.
(b) Classical conditioning
Attitudes can be formed through classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning: a type of learning in which, through repeated pairings, a
neutral stimulus starts to evoke a conditioned response.
Unconditioned stimulus: a stimulus (meat powder) that naturally evokes a particular
response (salivation)
Unconditioned response: a naturally occurring response (salivation).
Neutral stimulus: a stimulus (Pavlov’s bell) that initially evokes no response.
Conditioned stimulus: a neutral stimulus that, through repeated pairings with an
unconditioned stimulus, comes to evoke a conditioned response.
Conditioned response: a response that, through repeated pairings, is evoked by a
formerly neutral stimulus.
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