Psychology · Ch 6 — Attitude and Social Cognition
Summary
Summary
- Nature and components of attitudes: An attitude is a learned, relatively stable tendency to evaluate a person, issue, or object in a consistent way. It has three components: cognitive (beliefs/thoughts), affective (emotions/feelings), and behavioural (predisposition to act). This is the ABC model.
- Attitude formation: Attitudes are formed through learning — via direct experience, classical/operant conditioning, observational learning (modelling), and exposure to information from family, peers, and media.
- Attitude–behaviour link: Attitudes do not always predict behaviour. The link is stronger when the attitude is specific, strong, accessible, and formed through direct experience; when situational pressures are low; and when the person has high self-monitoring.
- Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger): When a person holds two inconsistent cognitions (or behaves contrary to an attitude), they experience an unpleasant tension called cognitive dissonance. To reduce it, they often change their attitude to align with the behaviour — especially when the behaviour was freely chosen and has insufficient external justification.
- Persuasion and attitude change: The elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Cacioppo) describes two routes: the central route (careful, thoughtful processing of arguments — leads to lasting change) and the peripheral route (superficial cues like attractiveness or credibility — leads to temporary change). Key factors: source credibility, message quality, audience involvement.
- Social cognition: How we process, store, and apply information about people and social situations. We use schemas (mental frameworks) to organise social knowledge, which helps us interpret the world quickly but can also lead to biases.
- Impression formation and attribution: We form impressions of others using central traits (e.g., warmth, competence) and peripheral traits. Attribution theory explains how we infer causes of behaviour: internal (dispositional) vs. external (situational) attributions. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overemphasise internal causes for others' behaviour and underestimate situational factors.
- Heuristics and biases: We use mental shortcuts like the availability heuristic (judging frequency by how easily examples come to mind) and the representativeness heuristic (judging category membership by similarity to a prototype). These can lead to systematic errors. …