6 1 15 7 6 15 Psyc221 Notes 1 Week Three a Attitudes and Attitude Change i Attitudes simply put are schemas about topics ii One type of attitude is a belief which is cognitive and is an information based schema 1 For example you may believe that dogs are loyal or school is challenging iii Attitudes also serve an evaluation function which is affective emotional and is an appraisal based schema 1 For example you may enjoy ice cream but dislike Justin Bieber iv Attitudes also serve an important behavioral function to help people manage impressions with others 1 For example you may tell another person you enjoy something more less than you really do in order to facilitate the interaction v Synchronizing attitudes or at least the appearance of synchronized attitudes makes social interactions run more smoothly 1 But genuinely mutual attitudes are a predictor of social bonding an attraction vi Attitudes can be formed through learning or conditioning 1 Through classical conditioning often used in advertising people may like a product service person or idea more if it is paired with something that elicits an automatic response vii The mere exposure effect refers to increasingly positive attitudes toward something simply by being exposed to it Being around something e g seeing it a lot makes people like it more viii Attitudes and behaviors can be surprisingly inconsistent 1 Attitudes can change and adjust over time 2 Relevancy 3 Measurement specificity ix Attitudes are most often measured with surveys but self reports and questionnaires can suffer from social desirability biases as well as only capture what s in people s conscious mind x Social psychologists are also interested in studying implicit attitudes 1 Implicit Association Test xi The link between attitudes and behavior also increases with attitude strength 1 How certain people are about their beliefs or how strongly they feel about a given topic xii Ambivalent attitudes make it harder to predict behavior xiii The attitude behavior link also increases with direct personal experience and self interest xiv People s attitudes can be modified if they have behaved in a way that is contradictory to the attitude 1 When people have realized that they contradicted themselves they become motivated to correct this contradiction because of a process called Cognitive dissonance a The negative emotional state that arises when people hold an attitude that is inconsistent with their behavior or another attitude xv Cognitive dissonance was originally discovered and studied by Leon Festinger 1 They participants were paid either 1 or 20 to tell a waiting participant a confederate that the tasks were really interesting 2 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 i Scientists are still debating whether pure altruism truly exists or if all seemingly altruistic behavior is selfishly motivated ii Altruism a form of prosocial behavior in which the ultimate goal is to improve another s welfare not selfish goals to improve one s own standing iii Evolutionary theories suggest organisms evolved according to survival of the fittest mechanisms and natural selection which predicts that organisms would naturally be competitive with each other Or if they do cooperate it s really because there s a selfish genetic benefit kin selection iv Helping tendencies change depending on if it s life or death or not 1 We are more likely to help kin in life or death but more likely to help strangers for things like holding a door Power of the situation v Bystander Effect A product of diffusion of responsibility 1 the more people are around the less likely someone will step up to help b Altruism Prosocial Behavior vi The norm of social responsibility in a society predicts greater altruism through the belief that people who are well off have a special duty responsibility to assist those in great need 1 This norm evokes a sense of fairness through equity people deserve to be treated in a way that we would want to be treated if we were in their position vii However the norm of social justice in a society predicts less altruism through the belief in a just world and karma 1 Evokes a sense of fairness through proportionality 2 Also associated with blaming the victim 3 Demanding benefits explanations on why to help people 4 People are more likely to help others when they are presented with some reason justification for helping viii Liberals equity Conservatives Proportionality ix Reciprocity people are more likely to help those who have helped them x Studies consistently show that most people are eager to help others when given the opportunity despite the pervasive belief that most other people don t want to help you This is an example of pluralistic ignorance 1 2 Most people believe others would say no to helping with a task but believe they themselves would say yes xi Altruism and religion 1 People link prosocial behavior to religious beliefs The more religious one is the more altruistic deeds they do 2 Using self reported data mass surveys there are plenty of studies showing that people who identify as religious are more altruistic than secular folks a However other research shows that people who are religious are also more likely to respond in a socially desirable way on questionnaires b So these studies using survey data are vulnerable to self report biases 3 It was found that requests from God cause people to think more universally about the welfare of all people 4 The Sunday effect where Christians are more likely to donate money than non religious folks but only on Sunday because they are put in a religious situation 1 This tendency toward prosocial helping may be innate and perhaps present at birth 2 As soon as 18 months of age infants barely old enough to walk and not yet able to speak more than babbles with no knowledge of rewards or incentives show xii Empathy altruism instinct c Aggression spontaneous acts of helpful altruism toward strangers in the lab xiii Other evidence suggests empathy is more like a personality trait and is stable across situations 1 Acts as a psychological mirror and lets people put themselves in other peoples shoes 2 Neurological studies have shown that people s brain activity mimics those whom they observe 3 Normative adults all have some amount of empathy except for psychopaths who literally lack
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