Study Guide for Exam 3 SOP3004 Unit 7 Attitudes Additional points to make sure you know from the reading In addition to all the bold terms questions will be drawn from the entire section entitled do attitudes really predict behaviors 1 What crisis did Wicker s critique provoke in the field Wicker argued that it is more likely that attitudes are unrelated or only slightly related to overt behaviors than that attitudes will be closely related to actions The crisis happened because Many social psychologists spent their careers studying attitudes and they were disturbed to hear that attitudes had no connection to what people actually did They did everything to defend themselves against Wicker s critique 2 Know how people responded to the crisis i e be able to describe all the scenarios for which it was discovered that people s behaviors do actually map onto their attitudes reasonably well o A first response the gap between general attitudes and specific behaviors was too big Ex Researcher may ask someone s attitude towards helping people and then measure whether the person was willing to donate blood Someone might be in favor of helping people in general but might be afraid of needles o Second solution Aggregating behavior combining across many different behaviors on different occasions Ex Instead of measuring behavior by a single test such as giving blood add of the persons willingness to do many different acts of helping others A person with a more positive attitude toward helping others will perform more of the behaviors o Third solution General attitudes can help cause behavior but only if they are prominent in the person s conscious mind and influence how the person thinks about the choices he she faces The broad attitude can influence specific behavior but only if it has a chance to shape how the person interprets and construes the specifics of the here and now situation Ex Before asking a person to give blood cause them to reflect on his or her attitude toward helping others then when the request for a blood donation came along the person would see it as an opportunity to help and hence the person s willingness to give blood would be shaped by that broad attitude o Accessibility refers to how easily the attitude comes to mind An attitude that does not easily come to mind will have little opportunity to exert influence on thought emotion and behavior Questions will be drawn from the section on belief perseverance 1 Make sure you can define and identify examples of belief perseverance Belief perseverance once beliefs form they are resistant to change Ex Participants given real and fake suicide notes and told to identify the real ones Researcher told participants either they got 24 out of 25 right or 10 out of 25 right and that the average was 16 correct At the end of experiment participants were told that the feedback given was bogus But participants who received the more successful feedback still thought they were more accurate on the test and would be more accurate on future tests than the other participants 2 Know the findings of the Anderson et al 1980 study Some participants read cases that suggested that risk taking people make better firefighters than cautious people and some participants were told the opposite After being told that the cases were bogus participants still believed the firefighting theories 3 Make sure you know some ways to combat belief perseverance Trying out the opposite theory to whatever theory you initially believe From the lectures Define attitudes a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone Ex If you like or dislike something for choosing How are attitudes different from beliefs Beliefs are pieces of information about something facts or opinions for explaining Identify examples of the ABC dimensions of attitudes o Affective feeling positively toward Bob Hoskins o Behavioral going out and watching all of Bob Hoskins films o Cognitive thinking Hey Bob Hoskins is pretty cool Affect emotional reactions to snakes I feel tense heart rate in the presence of snakes Behavior distance standing from snake willingness to touch a snake Cognition beliefs about snakes snakes control the rodent population or snakes will attack anything that moves Explain what is meant by dual attitudes Be able to define implicit and explicit attitudes o Implicit attitudes automatic and nonconscious evaluative responses o Explicit attitudes controlled and conscious evaluative responses Describe the IAT what it stands for how it works what it measures o The Implicit Association Test a method that demonstrates the conscious unconscious divergences designed to detect the strength of a person s automatic association between mental representations of objects concepts in memory Define cognitive dissonance An unpleasant state that occurs whenever an individual simultaneously holds two or more cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent Understand all the details of the Saul in a feather boa example Understand how it illustrates cognitive dissonance at work Did paying Saul to wear a feather boa make him wear it more Did paying him to wear it make him feel like he LIKED wearing it more o Operant conditioning theory give people rewards to change their behaviors o Step 1 On a whim Saul puts on a feather boa o Step 2 Erin gives Saul cold hard cash o Step 3 Saul starts wearing feather boas all the time o Although paying Saul made him wear the boa more it didn t make him like wearing the boa Describe the methods and findings of Festinger s 1959 dissonance study Know what they illustrate BE ABLE TO LABEL THE BARS ON THE RESULTS GRAPH know what happened in the no pay 1 and 20 condition o People show up for Measures of Performance o Study has to do with performing routine tasks like those found in factories o BORING Taking pegs off and turning pegs o Experimenter confesses the study is really about motivation and repetitive tasks o My confederate is gone can you tell the next participant you enjoyed this o 3 conditions No lie 1 for lie 20 for lie o Follow up questions about enjoyment of study o Results When the participants were asked to evaluate the experiment the participants who were paid only 1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than the participants who were paid 20 to lie o Conclusion Being paid only 1 is not sufficient incentive for lying and so those who were paid 1 experienced dissonance They could only overcome that dissonance by coming
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