Transcript Snímek 1
Social psychology: Attitudes, social cognition 16th November 2007 Social psychology Study how people’s thoughts, feelings and actions are affected by others Attitudes Learned predispositions to respond in a favorable or unfavorable manner to a particular person, behavior, belief or thing. ABC model of attitudes • Affect component • Behavior component • Cognition component Do you like oranges? What do you think about oranges? A: I like them. I like the taste… B: I try to eat at least one daily… C: Oranges are healthy, contains lot of vitamin C… Forming and maintaining attitudes Classical conditioning Forming and maintaining attitudes Operant conditioning • Can we maintain attitude others don’t share? Observational learning • Children pick up prejudices of their parents… • Learning attitudes through media Persuasion: changing attitudes Message source Attractiveness Expertise Trustworthiness Recipient (target) of message Central versus peripheral route processing Message characteristics One sided versus two sided arguments Fear producing Message source: attitude communicator Greatest attitude change: • physical and social attractiveness • expertise and trustworthiness The message One sided arguments Two sided arguments Fear producing messages Characteristics of the recipient intelligence??? gender differences??? central route processing (careful perceiving, thinking about the content) peripheral route processing (other factors than content) age, race, religion, income, marital status… Attitudes and behavior consistency between attitudes and behavior is likely people tend to be consistent in different attitudes they hold • liberalism • vegetarianism… How our behavior shapes our attitudes Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance • the conflict that arises when a person holds contradictory cognitions • this dissonance must be reduced • can be done by changing attitudes Two contradictory cognitions 1. “I smoke.” 2. “Smoking leads to cancer.” Dissonance Modifying one or both cognitions (“I really don’t smoke too much”) Changing perceived importance of one cognition (“The evidence is weak that smoking causes cancer”) Adding additional cognitions (“I exercise so much that it doesn’t matter that I smoke”) Denying that cognitions are related (“There is no evidence linking smoking and cancer”) Social cognition = How people understand others What other people are like… • Schemas about people and social experiences Impression formation • Central traits What have you mentioned at first glimps? How do you feel about him? Why is he so fed-up? Is he good goalkeeper? What you don’t like about him? Attribution process 1. Why is he so fed-up? Is the cause situational or dispositional? Biases in attribution: • Fundamental attribution error • Hallo effect • Assumed similarity bias Thank you for your attention!