Social Psychology
- Study of human social behaviour
- Identify regularities in social behav
- Study various aspects of interactions between: individuals; within social groups; individuals and social systems
Attitudes
Psychological tendency expressed by evaluating particular entity (attitude object - anything we have attitude towards) with favour/disfavour
3 components
- affect: emotional evaluations (pleasure, joy)
- behavioural: dispositions (tendencies, do I approach?)
- cognition: cognitive evaluations (importance, benefits)
Attitude varies in:
- Valence (positive to negative, can be ambivalent)
- strength (weak -> strong)
- complexity (simple -> complex, cognitive)
- accessibility (implicit -> explicit)
Formation of attitudes
Experience/”mere exposure”
- mere exposure: general tendency to have positive attitudes
Operant conditioning
- punishment and rewards
Classical conditioning
- association
- spreading attitude effect
- e.g. pair product with popular celebrity
Social learning/modelling
Self-perception theory
- infer attitudes from our own behaviour
- e.g. listen to lots of country music therefore must like country music
Attitude change - Yale model 4 factors
Source/communicator
- credibility (e.g. expertise, trustworthiness) ^
- similarity (to self) ^
- attractiveness (only if accompanied with strong argument) ^
Recipient/audience
- gender and age = mixed results
- low intelligence more inclined to change than high intelligence
- pre existing attitude strength (weak more inclined to change)
Message
- amount, clarity, comprehendible
- balance: 2 sided argument (if counter argument easily refuted)
- FEAR (EXAM); under certain conditions can highly influence attitude
- other researchers found opposite
- fear works best if coupled with info. on how to respond
- inverted U curve fear has to be optimal, too extreme can backfire
Channel (communication)
- audio/visual for easy messages
- written for difficult messages
- in person better
Attitude change - Elaboration likelihood model
When are we likely to elaborate on quality of a message itself rather than being swayed by persuasive cues (e.g. attractiveness, fear)
Petty and Cacciopo (1986)
- Central route from persuasive message to attitude change:
high elaboration of message content -> careful processing on info -> attitude change based on quality of argument
- Peripheral route from persuasive message to attitude change:
little/no elaboration of message content -> no careful processing -> attitude change based on persuasive techniques
Which route?
- Central route: issue is important to us, need time to think a lot about issue, need cognitive capacity to evaluate content
- Peripheral route: issue not important to us, limited time to think (spontaneous), distracted - don’t have mental capacity
Attitudes to Behaviour
Attitudes should predict behaviour but often don’t (smoking, unhealthy eating)
e.g. Lapiere (1934) Chinese in restaurant
Why?
- competing attitudes
- self efficacy / perceived behaviour control
- social norms and groups
- habit
Cognitive dissonance
Uneasiness when inconsistency between attitudes and behaviour
Seek to reduce by:
- change cognitions or behav
- reduce importance of one of cognitions or behav
- add additional consonant cognitions or behav
Festinger and Carlsmith (1959)
- participants did boring game for 1 hour
- control (no dissonance)
- low dissonance: paid $20 to tell next person its fun
- high dissonance: paid $1 to tell next person its fun
results
- control: congruent cognitions and behav
- $20 low dissonance: cognition of thinking boring task conflicts with behav of saying fun. but behav justified cause of high reward
- $1 high dissonance: conflict, behav can’t be justified by reward so justify behaviour by changing cognitions of task and thinking it was fun
Social cognitions
Cognition that concerns thinking about other ppl/ interpersonal relationships / social institutions
and how we conform
Social cognitions - schemas
Based off past experiences (direct and indirect)
Like theories
Types:
- self. (knowledge structure about self)
-person (knowledge structure about specific ppl)
- role (knowledge structure about role occupants)
-social group (stereotypes)
- event
Social cognitions - Impression Formation
Observe and evaluate others to form impressions (draw inferences and create mental representation)
Forms how we think, feel and behave towards others
Not objective or very accurate as form quick from little info
Social cognitions - Impression Formation BIAS EXAM
Order effects (presentation of info):
primary
- info first presented disproportionately
- influences impression (stronger and more common)
- central traits: affect interpretation of later traits
- more attention to first traits
recency
- info presented last more impact than early
- when distracted
- when little motivation to attend
Asch study - list of words
Valence effects
-positive impressions typically formed when no negative info (halo effect)
- negative impressions formed if any -ve info present
- difficult to change even in light of subsequent +ve info
- biased towards -ve
- unusual and distinctive, attracts attention
- signifies potential danger, survival value
- asch - lists with warm and cold
INFO PRESENTED FIRST AND LAST MORE LIKELY TO FORM IMPRESSIONS
Stereotypes
- prejudge towards particular groups
- assume certain traits
- relate to social group schemas
- often oversimplified and innacurate
- leads to prejudice and discrimination
Heuristics
- Cognitive shortcuts providing adequately accurate inferences
- immediate judgments we use to inference things
- less time, less effort, quick solutions
- sometimes not accurate, misapplied, inadequate
Representative heuristic
- Judge the likelihood of event by the how much it resembles prototype/schema
- therefore sometimes ignore base rate info (how many people in pop)
- e.g. Luke likes reading the newspaper, likes politics and wears suits. Does Luke live in QLD or NSW?
Availability Heuristic EXAM
- Judge likelihood by how quickly/easily instances come to mind
- frequency not only influence of ease, also: how noticeable event is and how recent
- e.g. more likely to die from car or plane crash?
just saw car crash on news so car crash
Social cognitions - Attribution
- Ppl infer cause of behaviour
- don’t just passively observe behav
- social perception motivated by need to predict and control environment
Attribute behav to either:
- internal/dispositional factors (personalities characteristics)
- external/situational factors (environmental influences)
Social cognitions - Attribution
Kelleys Covariation Model EXAM
Covariation principle:
- attribute behav to the cause with which it covaries most closely over time
Assumes we have 3 types of info:
- consistency
- distinctiveness
- consensus
Consistency
- does person behave same over time and context?
- low consistency = doesn’t -> situation (blame context)
- high consistency = does -> person/target
Distinctiveness
- does person bahav same way to other targets as it does to this one?
- low distinctiveness = any target -> person
- high distinctiveness = just this -> target
Consensus
- do other people perform same behaviour to same target?
- low consensus = don’t -> person
- high consensus = do -> target
Social cognitions - Attribution errors
- highly rational but bias
- fundamental attribution error: tendency to attribute others behav -> internal qualities not external
own behaviour -> external, not internal - self-serving bias: tendency to attribute success -> internal, stable and failure -> temporary, external
