Attitudes and Behavior

I. What is an attitude? A. Attitude: a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone (developed, maintained, and changed via the interactive relationship among one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors). B. Three Components of an Attitude: 1) Cognitive: what a person believes about the source of the attitude. 2) Affective: how a person feels about the source of the attitude. 3) Behavioral: how a person acts towards the source of the attitude.

INITIAL ATTITUDE = I don’t like psychology. Cognitive component = I believe psychology is uninteresting. Affective component = Being in this psychology class makes me angry. Behavioral component = I stop attending my psychology class. ATTITUDE MAINTAINED = I don’t like psychology. Behavioral consequence of maintained attitude = I do not become a psychology major. Affective component = Being in this psychology class makes me angry. Cognitive component = I believe psychology is uninteresting. Behavioral component = I stop attending my psychology class. ATTITUDE MAINTAINED = I don’t like psychology. Behavioral consequence of maintained attitude = I do not become a psychology major

Let’s say that attendance is required… Behavioral component = I always attend my psychology class. Affective component = Being in this psychology class makes me laugh and therefore happy. Cognitive component = I believe psychology is interesting. ATTITUDE CHANGED = I like psychology. Behavioral consequence of changed attitude = I become a psychology major. Behavioral component = I always attend my psychology class. Cognitive component = I find out that psychology is interesting. Affective component = Being in this psychology class makes me happy. ATTITUDE CHANGED = I like psychology. Behavioral consequence of changed attitude = I become a psychology major

C. Hypocrisy: publicly advocating some attitudes and then acting in a way that is inconsistent with those attitudes. II. When Attitudes Predict Behavior A. Implicit versus Explicit Attitudes 1) Implicit Attitudes: unconscious associations between objects and evaluative responses. 2) Explicit Attitudes: consciously accessible attitudes that are controllable and easy to report.

B. Theory of Planned Behavior: one’s attitudes, perceived social norms, and feelings of control, together determine one’s intentions and guide behavior.

C. General Attitudes versus Specific Attitudes 1) General Attitudes tend to be more stable than Specific Attitudes and are better predictors of overall behavior than specific behaviors. 2) General attitudes tend to be more stable because… (a) once they’re formed, we don’t usually go back and constantly reevaluate our fundamental beliefs. If we were always doing that, then we would never get anything done. (b) we tend to associate ourselves with people who have similar general attitudes and engage in similar attitude reinforcing activities. D. Primacy and Recency: we tend to like what we were exposed to first and what we were exposed to most recently.

Prejudicial Attitudes Predict Discriminatory Behavior

III. When Behavior Predicts Attitudes A. Role Playing 1) Norms: standards for accepted and expected behavior in different situations. Norms prescribe “proper” behavior and can vary among different cultures. Norms typically describe what most others do; what is “normal”. 2) Role: a specific set of norms that define how people ought to behave in a given social position. 3) The Stanford Prison Experiment

B. The Snowball Effect: a process that starts from an initial state of small significance and builds upon itself, becoming larger and perhaps potentially dangerous or disastrous (a "spiral of decline"), though it might be beneficial instead. C. The Benjamin Franklin Effect: doing a favor for someone can increase liking of the person for whom the favor was done.

IV. Why Behavior Affects Attitudes A. Self-Perception Theory: When we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us, by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs. B. James-Lange Theory: a person’s interpretation of a stimulus evokes the autonomic changes directly. The psychological experience of emotion is the individual’s perception of those physiological changes.

C. Extrinsic Motivation: refers to things that are external to oneself, such as money or rewards. D. Intrinsic Motivation: refers to things that are internal, such as pride of accomplishment. E. Overjustification Effect: the result of bribing people to do what they already like doing; they may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing.

V. Cognitive Dissonance Theory: a state of tension that exists when an individual holds contradictory attitudes, or exhibits behavior that is inconsistent with their attitudes. A. There are four basic ways we try to reduce cognitive dissonance… 1) By changing our behavior to bring it in line with the dissonant cognition. 2) By attempting to justify our behavior through changing one of the dissonant cognitions. 3) By attempting to justify our behavior by adding new cognitions. 4) Trivialize and/or ignore the entire dissonance arousing situation.

B. Self-Affirmation Theory: when people experience a threat to their self-image after engaging in an undesirable behavior, they can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self. C. When dealing with dissonance between you and someone else, you can… 1) Change your attitude. 2) Change the other person’s attitude. 3) Derogate: Say the other person is a fool.

VI. The Four Paradigms of Cognitive Dissonance… A. The Free-Choice Paradigm 1) Post-decision Dissonance: dissonance aroused after making a decision, typically reduced by enhancing the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and devaluating the rejected alternatives. B. The Belief-Disconfirmation Paradigm

C. The Effort-Justification Paradigm 1) Justification of Effort: the tendency for individuals to increase their liking for something they have worked hard to attain.

D. The Induced-Compliance Paradigm 1) Insufficient Justification: reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s behavior when external justification is “insufficient”.