Social and Organizational Psychology
IBP 2017-2018
Attitudes: evaluations that can color our experience of virtually any aspect of the world
Explicit: Consciously accessible and easy to report
Implicit: Not consciously accessible or controllable
Social learning: many of our views are acquired by interacting with others, or simply observing their behavior
- Classical conditioning: Learning based on association
- subliminal conditioning: occurs in the absence of conscious awareness of the stimuli involved (e.g. photos shown for a very brief period of time)
- mere exposure
- Instrumental conditioning: Rewards for doing a certain behavior
- Observational learning: When individuals acquire attitudes or behaviors by observing others
Social networks: sets of individuals with whom we interact on a regular basis
Social comparison: our tendency to compare ourselves with others to determine whether our view of social reality is or is not correct
Link between attitudes and behavior:
- Situational constraints: may prevent us from expressing our attitudes overtly
- Pluralistic ignorance: believing that others have different attitudes than we do, which can limit our willingness to express our attitudes in public
- These factors can make our attitudes more likely to guide our behavior:
- extremity of our attitude position
- the certainty with which our attitudes are held
- whether we have personal experience with the attitude object
- Theory of planned behavior: the decision to engage in a particular behavior is the result of a rational process
- Attitude-to-behavior process model: in situations where our behavior is more spontaneous, and we do not engage in deliberate thought, attitudes influence behavior by shaping our perception and interpretation of the situation
Persuasion: efforts to change attitudes through the use of message
- We process persuasive messages in two different ways:
- systematic processing: involves careful attention to message content
- heuristic processing: involves the use of mental shortcuts (e.g., “experts are usually right”)
- Resistance to persuasion:
- reactance: negative reactions to efforts by others to reduce our personal freedom
- forewarning: the knowledge that someone is trying to change our attitudes
- When ego-depleted, people experience greater difficulty self-regulating, which undermines resistance to persuasion
Maintaining current attitudes
- Selective avoidance: the tendency to overlook or disregard information that contradicts our existing views
- Selective exposure: actively seeking out information that is consistent with our existing attitudes
Cognitive dissonance: an unpleasant state that occurs when we notice discrepancies between our attitudes and our behavior
- Less-leads-to-more effect: less reasons or rewards for an action often leads to greater attitude change
- Forced compliance: when we are induced by external factors to say or do things that are inconsistent with our attitudes
- Trivialization: concluding that the inconsistency is unimportant
- Indirect strategies: to the extent that the self can be affirmed by focusing on some other positive feature of the self, then dissonance can be reduced without changing one’s attitudes
- Dissonance that is induced by making us aware of our own hypocrisy can result in behavioral changes
Cultural tightness versus looseness: cultures differ dramatically in the extent to which people are expected to act in ways that are consistent with prevailing social norms
Reference:
Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited
--Chapter 5
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