Psychology 324: Exam Summary
Chapter 5: Attitudes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………2
Chapter 6: Persuasion and Attitude Change……………….………………………………………………………18
Chapter 7: Social Influence…………………………………………………………………………………………….…..35
Chapter 8: People in Groups……………………………………………………………………………………………….49
Chapter 10: Prejudice and Discrimination…………………………………………………………………………..56
Chapter 11: Intergroup Behaviour………………………………………………………………………………………73
1
,Chapter 5: Attitudes
Structure and function of attitudes
A short history of attitudes
• Attitude: An enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies
towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols OR
• A general feeling or evaluation about some person, object or issue.
• There were three main phases in the history of attitude research:
1. A concentration on attitude measurements related to behaviour. (1920's and
1930's)
2. A focus on the dynamics of change in an individual's attitudes. (1950's and 1960's)
3. A focus on the cognitive and social structure and function of attitudes and attitude
systems. (1980's and 1990's)
Attitude structure
• One of the most fundamental psychological questions that can be asked about
attitudes is whether they are a unitary construct or whether they have a number of
different components.
• There are three different views regarding how many components attitudes consist of:
➢ The one-component attitude model (preferred by Thurstone) defines attitudes as
“the affect for or against a psychological object”. This means your attitude is
whether you like or dislike the object you are faced with.
➢ The two-component attitude model (which originated in Allport's theory) includes
the above idea of positive or negative affect, but includes a new dimension –
mental readiness.
➢ The three-component attitude model (rooted in ancient philosophy) includes
thought, feeling and action – the trichotomy of human experience. It states that
an attitude consists of cognitive, affective and behavioural components. So each
attitude is made up of a cluster of feelings, likes, dislikes, behavioural intentions,
thoughts and ideas.
Attitude functions
• Attitudes exist because they have different functions, such as knowledge,
instrumentality (a means to an end), ego defence (protecting your self-esteem) and
value expressiveness (allowing people to display the values that define them).
• An attitude saves energy because we don't need to figure out from scratch how to
relate to the object in question.
Cognitive consistency
2
, • Cognitive-consistency theories are a group of attitude theories that stress that people
try to maintain internal consistency, order and agreement among their various
cognitions.
• These theories also emphasise cognitions, which are the knowledge, beliefs, thoughts
and ideas people have about themselves and their environment.
• An example of a cognitive-consistency theory is the cognitive dissonance theory and
the balance theory.
• Consistency theories state that people will change their thoughts to make sure that
there is no inconsistency or disharmony (dissonance) between their thoughts.
• The Balance Theory was derived from Heider and Gestalt psychology (which explains
that psychological phenomena are made up of interacting forces).
➢ The Balance Theory states that people prefer attitudes that are consistent with
each other over those that are inconsistent.
➢ It focuses on the P-O-X unit of the individual's cognitive field.
➢ P represents a person, O another person and X and attitude, object or topic.
➢ The relationships between components can be positive or negative, so this takes
into account how the Person feels about the Other person, how the Person feels
about X and how the Other person feels about X.
➢ This triad is considered balanced if there is an odd number of positive
relationships.
➢ There are 8 different combinations, of which 4 are balanced. So for example, if P
likes X, but doesn't like O and O doesn't like X, there is only 1 positive relationship
in the triad, so it is balanced.
➢ (Think of it this way – if you don't like someone, you don't mind if you like
something that they don't. But if you like someone and you like something they
don't, there's a bit more friction.)
➢ If the triad is imbalanced, the person may feel compelled to restore balance.
➢ All the possible combinations are seen on p.152 if you need further clarification.
Cognition and evaluation
• The Sociocognitive model is an attitude theory that highlights an evaluative
component.
• An attitude is defined as “a person's evaluation of an object of thought”.
• An attitude object (e.g. a shark) is represented in memory by:
➢ An objective label: This helps to make sense of the world and deal with the
environment. E.g. “A big sea creature with sharp teeth”.
➢ The rules for applying that label: e.g. “It eats other fish and sometimes people”
➢ An evaluative summary of that object: This serves as a heuristic, or a simple
strategy for appraising an object. E.g. “It is scary and should be avoided”.
3
, a. A knowledge structure supporting that evaluation: This serves as a schematic
which organises and guides memory for event and action. E.g. “It is a scientifically
and fictionally well-documented threat to humans”.
Decision-making and attitudes
• Information Processing is the evaluation of information.
• In relations to attitudes, the means by which people acquire knowledge, form and
change attitudes.
• According to the Information Integration Theory, we use cognitive algebra to
construct our attitudes from information we receive about attitude objects.
• Cognitive algebra is when we work out the net value of something by weighing up the
positive and negative components of it.
Can attitudes predict behaviour?
• Studies have shown that less than 9% of the variability in a behaviour is accounted for
by an attitude, which doesn't mean much statistically.
Beliefs, intentions and behaviour
• There are various things that may prevent attitudes from turning into behaviours, such
as the extent to which the attitude is accessible, whether the attitude is expressed
publicly or privately, and whether the individual identifies strongly or weakly with a
group that accepts that attitude.
• For example, someone may have the attitude that alcohol is a bad form of recreation,
but may indulge in alcohol anyway because their peers would not accept their
attitude.
• A better predictor of actions is the interaction between attitudes, beliefs and
behavioural intentions.
• For this, we need to establish how strong and how valuable the person's beliefs are –
some beliefs will carry more weight than others towards the final act.
• Belief strength has a probability estimate ranging from 0 to 1.
• The value of belief is rated from -2 to +2. These two values are multiplied to give you
the resulting probability of the action.
Specific attitudes
• Also, the more specific the attitude you investigate, the better the chances of making
accurate predictions regarding behaviour.
• For example, investigating “The attitude of women towards using birth control pills in
the next two years” is a much better predictor than “The attitude of women towards
birth control.”
4
