Social Attitudes Outline Lecture 12 Notes Behavior Attitude Consistency Chinese couple study Important Factors Attitude change Dissonance Basic Idea Effort justification Persuasion Sender message receiver Routes Central Peripheral Social Psychology psychologists examine how being with other people and interaction with other people affects our behavior and thinking They look at different aspects of interactions such as the different kinds of relationships and crowd behavior They will study attitudes attribution how we explain our own behavior and the behavior of others and obedience conformity Attitude locates an object of thought on a dimension of judgment assigning and evaluation to an object of thought this evaluation being on a particular scale dimension Object of thought is anything you can think about Dimension of Judgment is an evaluation you judge the object on a dimension with a high and a low Locate an object of thought on a dimension when you place the object of thought between high and low Attitude components Cognitive judgment or evaluation that you make like it don t like it kind of Affective emotional response to the attitude object positive or negative Behavioral how the person behaves with regard to the attitude object do you like it strong or weak do anything Behavior attitude consistency When people have very strong attitudes they DO NOT necessarily behave People can have the same cognitive evaluation but different affective and Social Psychologists ask can you predict behavior from the components Behavior attitude consistency is about whether people behave according to accordingly behavioral reactions their attitudes Persuasion Attitude Change Different components Chinese Couple Study Experimenter conducted a survey he sent a questionnaire to restaurants and hotels and asked if a Chinese couple came to your establishment would you serve them 90 of the respondents said that they would refuse service and expressed very strong negative attitudes Then the experimenter went to all of the establishments with a Chinese couple and the Chinese couple asked for service o Every single establishment served the Chinese couple Study had a very large confounding variable the person who filled out the survey may not be the person they are dealing with Factors Attitude consistency is very low the strength of an attitude the affective What factors can increase Attitude Behavior Consistency component did not predict whether people would actually act 1 People who are personally involved are much more likely to act being personally affected by the thought object increases Behavior attitude consistency Source person who is giving the argument credibility expert expertise or trustworthiness of the person making the argument and likeability physical attractiveness of the person Nature of the Argument one sided or two sided one sided is better for people who are ignorant or already convinced two sided is good for knowledgeable audiences and mixed audiences Fear Arousal works if 1 The feared consequence is easily avoidable 2 Consequences are viewed by the audience as terrible 3 Consequence are viewed as fairly probable many fail at this Leave audience to draw a conclusion this is effective with a strong argument and a neutral audience however it can backfire under any other circumstance Receiver awareness of techniques can affect whether fear arousal works If you are made aware of attitude changing techniques and then you immediately see a fear arousing add it is likely to be ineffective However as time goes by your immunization goes away Latitude of Acceptance a person has a space around their attitude on the cognitive dimension of the attitude and you are willing to listen to arguments that fall within this range Dissonance when you have two related cognitions beliefs ideas emotions opinions attitudes that are inconsistent with each other a state of dissonance occurs This makes people feel uncomfortable with their inconsistent ideas so they will act to reduce the dissonance by changing their attitudes
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