Evaluating the World: Attitudes

Social psychology is the study of how we think and behave in the vast array of social situations
that we experience. One area of social psychology, social cognition, investigates the ways in
which we think (cognition) about ourselves and others – for example, studying how we develop
attitudes, our liking or disliking for the people, places, and things in our world. We all have
attitudes about a multitude of things that represent the evaluative beliefs we hold about the
contents of our world (e.g., liking country music or disliking lazy people). Social cognition refers
to the ways in which we think about ourselves and others.
Attitudes are evaluative beliefs that contain affective, behavioral, and cognitive components.
Attitudes develop through learning processes, including classical conditioning, operant
conditioning, and observational learning or modeling. Attitudes sometimes predict how we will
behave in certain situations.
Cognitive dissonance results from a lack of cognitive consistency; it motivates us to change
either our attitudes or our behavior.
Persuasion occurs when someone makes a direct attempt to change our attitudes. We tend to be
most persuaded by people who appear to be attractive, credible, and expert. Typically, people are
easier to persuade when they are processing on the peripheral route rather than the central route
Acquiring Attitudes Through Learning
One learning process that affects our attitudes about the world is classical conditioning which is
often responsible for the development of certain learned emotional and physiological responses
in humans Because classical conditioning has the power to change the way we feel about certain
stimuli, it also has the power to influence our attitudes toward these stimuli. For example, if a
man is robbed by a gang member, he may be classically conditioned to fear (CR) people who
wear gang colors and clothes (CS). In short, classical conditioning can often explain the gut-level
emotional and physiological aspects of our attitudes. Similarly, if a celebrity (US) makes us feel
positive emotion (UR), then seeing this celebrity marketing a product (NS/CS) may condition us
to have a positive emotional reaction (CR) when we encounter the product.
Operant conditioning, or learning through the consequences of our behavior also affects our
attitudes. If you are rewarded for having certain attitudes, the attitude will be strengthened. But if
you are punished for having certain attitudes, the attitude will be weakened. For example, if your
friends applaud your efforts to “go green” and recycle your trash, then your pro-green attitude is
likely to strengthen.
Operant conditioning can also influence our attitudes through the consequences of our direct
interaction with the objects of our attitude.
Attitude-Behavior Consistency

Forming Impressions of Others

One of the most important aspects of social cognition is impression formation, or how we
understand and make judgments about others. When we meet someone for the first time, we
usually attempt to determine what type of person he is. Is this person kind, smart, aggressive, or
untrustworthy? We want to know. Why do we want to know what other people are like? In short,
if we have a good understanding of other people’s traits and abilities, we can predict how they
will behave in certain situations. This allows us to guide our own behavior in social situations.
Without some understanding of others, social interactions would be much more awkward and
uncertain.
The Attribution Process
One basic social cognitive tendency is to try to explain the behavior of ourselves and others, but
how do you determine the traits and characteristics of someone you have just met? If you are
thinking that we pay attention to what the person says and does, you are correct. When we judge
a person, we observe his behavior, and then we attempt to determine the cause of this behavior.
This process of assigning cause to behavior is called attribution. For example, imagine that you
enter a local café and see a woman yelling at a man in the corner booth. Witnessing her outburst,
you would likely try to determine why the woman is yelling. Is it because she is an aggressive
person? Or did the man somehow provoke this type of outburst in an otherwise kind woman?
Questions like these may pass through your mind as you watch the scene unfold.
In this example, we can attribute the woman’s behavior to one of two types of causes. We can
attribute the behavior to her traits, abilities, or characteristics, in which case we are making a
trait attribution. Or we may attribute the behavior to something in the environment, in which
case we are making a situational attribution. If we make a trait attribution about the yelling
woman, we assume that she is yelling because she is an aggressive person. If we make a
situational attribution, we assume that something happened in the environment that caused the
woman to yell – perhaps her companion accidently spilled hot coffee in her lap. Note that when
we make a situational attribution, we do not attribute the woman’s behavior to her personality.
Forming Impressions of Others
In forming impressions of others, we make trait or situational attributions when we assign cause
to their behavior. The fundamental attribution error (also known as the correspondence bias) is
the tendency to overuse trait explanations during attribution. The actor/observer bias and the self-
serving bias are two other sources of mistaken or biased attributions.
Prejudice: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Prejudices are negatively biased stereotypes that are applied to all members of a social group
regardless of the members’ individual characteristics. Like most attitudes, prejudices are learned.
Intergroup dynamics such as in-group bias and out-group homogeneity bias often play a role in
prejudice.
The contact hypothesis states that mere contact between in-group and out-group members can
reduce prejudice. Cooperative contact and superordinate goals have been shown to be more
effective in reducing prejudice.
Being Drawn to Others: The Nature of Attraction
Some of the factors that affect our attraction to others include proximity, similarity of their
attitudes and characteristics to ours, physical attractiveness, and the biochemical processes in our
bodies.
Group Influence
Throughout our lifetime, we will belong to a multitude of groups – some of which we join and
some of which we belong to by circumstance – families, communities, clubs, teams, professional
organizations, and so on. For many of us, belonging to such groups is something that we value,
but why? Psychologists suggest several potential explanations for why we join groups. Groups
may give us companionship, make us feel safe, make us feel proud, provide us with information,
or help us achieve our goals in life. Regardless of why we join a group, once we do join, the
group and its collective members then have the power to influence our behavior.
Conformity is the tendency to behave in ways that are consistent with the norms or expectations
of a group. In normative conformity, we conform just to avoid breaking norms whereas in
informational conformity, we conform because we are persuaded by conformity pressure to
believe the group’s stance is correct. Conformity is influenced by such factors as majority group
size, unanimity of the majority group, anonymity, group cohesion, and self-esteem.
Social facilitation occurs when we perform better in the presence of others, but sometimes
working with others can lead to social loafing as group members decrease their effort.
Social Forces Within Groups: Norms and Cohesiveness
Groups are characterized by the expectations and attitudes of their members. Group norms are
the rules that guide the behavior of group members. Norms can be explicitly stated rules or
unwritten expectations that members have for behavior within the group. Norms tell us how to
dress, how to behave, how to interact with each other, and so on. Virtually every group has its
own unique set of norms – each family, culture, workplace, and group of friends may have
different expectations for how its members should behave.
In general, we do not like to break the norms of the groups to which we belong. When we do, we
may face several unpleasant consequences. Group members may ridicule us or try to persuade us
to change our behavior, or – perhaps most threatening – we might be thrown out or ostracized
from the group.
Groups often fulfill social needs and give us a sense of security and identity. Because of these
benefits, we often value our group memberships and wish to protect them. The degree to which
members wish to maintain membership in the group is referred to as cohesiveness. In groups
whose members have very positive attitudes about their membership in the group, cohesiveness
is high, and the group tends to be close-knit. When cohesiveness is high, the pressure we feel to
meet group norms is also high.
Groupthink occurs when groups working under conditions of isolation, high cohesiveness, stress,
and dictatorial leadership make poor decisions after failing to examine all possible solutions to a
problem.
Requests and Demands: Compliance and Obedience
Compliance is giving in to a simple request. Compliance situations are very common in life. For
instance, salespeople try to get us to agree to buy their products. Doctors ask us to follow their
instructions. Spouses ask their partners to do household chores.
Compliance Techniques: Getting People to Say “Yes”
1. In foot-in-the-door compliance, one is more likely to yield to a second larger request after
having already complied with a first, smaller request.
2. In door-in-the-face compliance, one is more likely to yield to a second, smaller request after
having refused an earlier large request.
3. low-balling increasing compliance by first getting the person to agree to a deal and then
changing the terms of the deal to be more favorable to yourself.
4. that’s-not-all increasing compliance by sweetening the deal with additional incentives.
Reciprocity, or feeling obligated to return others’ favors, is a major reason why we comply.
Obedience: Doing What We Are Told to Do
Obedience is giving in to a demand. Factors that make us more likely to obey orders, even when
they direct us to behave destructively, include: the presence of an authority figure; the foot-in-the
door compliance of the slippery slope (the use of foot-in-the-door compliance in an obedience
situation to get people to obey increasing demands); and increased psychological distance (the
degree to which one can disassociate oneself from the consequences of his/her actions).
Aggression: Hurting Others
Aggression is causing harm or injury to someone who does not wish to be harmed. It can be
classified as instrumental or hostile aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression for example, a child may hit a playmate to
distract her so the child can grab her toy whereas hostile aggression is aimed solely at hurting
others for example, a bully may punch another child on the playground just to see the child cry.
Potential causes of aggression include: high levels of testosterone, a lack of serotonin, brain
damage caused by child abuse, observational learning or modeling the aggression of others,
cognitive neoassociation theory (proposes that cues present during an aggressive event can
become associated in memory with the thoughts and emotions experienced during that event),
and the frustration aggression hypothesis (the idea that frustration causes aggressive behavior).
Choosing to Help Others: Prosocial Behavior
Helping behavior, or altruism, is the tendency to help others in need with little concern for our
own gain.
One of the factors affecting helping behavior is the bystander effect, in which diffusion of
responsibility reduces the likelihood of obtaining help when there are many witnesses. Pluralistic
ignorance may also prevent witnesses from perceiving the situation as an emergency.