Transcript Chapter One

Social Psychology
David Myers
10e
Copyright 2010 McGraw-Hill Companies
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Chapter Four
• Behavior and Attitudes
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Attitude
 Favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward
something or someone
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict Our
Behavior?
• People’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted
their varying behaviors
– Moral hypocrisy
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict Our
Behavior?
• When Attitudes Predict Behavior
– When social influences on what we say are
minimal
• Implicit
– Implicit association test (IAT)
• Explicit
– When other influences on behavior are minimal
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict Our
Behavior?
• When Attitudes Predict Behavior
– When attitudes specific to the behavior are
examined
– When attitudes are potent
• Self-awareness
• Forge strong attitudes through experience
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When Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• Role Playing
– Role
• Set of norms that defines how people in a given social
position ought to behave
– Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford’s prison study
• Abu-Ghraib controversy
Stanford Prison Experiment
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When Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• When Saying Becomes Believing
– When there is no compelling external explanation
for one’s words, saying becomes believing
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When Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon
– Tendency for people who have first agreed to a
small request to comply later with a larger request
• Low-ball technique
– 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
» Used by some car dealers
Compliance Techniques
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When Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• Evil and Moral Acts
– Wartime
Phil Zimbardo
• Actions and attitudes feed on each other
• When evil behavior occurs we tend to justify it as right
– Peacetime
• Moral action, especially when chosen rather than
coerced, affects moral thinking
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When Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• Interracial Behavior and Racial Attitudes
– Racial behavior help shape our social
consciousness
• By doing, not saying racial attitudes were changed
– Legislating morality
• Social Movements
– Political and social movements may legislate
behavior designed to lead to attitude change on a
mass scale
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• Self-Presentation: Impression Management
– Assumes that people, especially those who selfmonitor their behavior hoping to create good
impressions, will adapt their attitude reports to
appear consistent with their actions
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• Self-Justification: Cognitive Dissonance
– Tension that arises when one is simultaneously
aware of two inconsistent cognitions
• To reduce this tension, we adjust our thinking
– Insufficient justification
• Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s
behavior when external justification is “insufficient”
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• Self-Justification: Cognitive Dissonance
– Dissonance after decisions
• Deciding-becomes-believing effect
• Can breed overconfidence
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
• Self-Perception Theory
– 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
• Expressions and attitude
• Overjustification and intrinsic motivations
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
Figure 4.7
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