Social Thought

11-A: Attitudes

• What do social psychologists mean when they use the word attitude?

• What are the three components of an attitude (ABCs)

• What is the consistency principle?  How did LaPiere (1934) demonstrate that our attitudes and behavior are not always as consistent as we might assume?

• What two variables determine the strength of an attitude?

• How might you operationalize an attitude using?

  • Behavioral observation?

  • Likert scales?

READ: Attitudes and Behavior

If the consistency principle is true, we should be able to determine people's attitudes simply by watching their behavior.  For example, attitudes towards recycling might vary throughout the population, so one way of operationalizing the positivity and strength of your attitude might be to determine what percentage of time you properly recycle items.  Someone who we observe recycling 100% of the time must have a very positive and strong attitude towards recycling, much more so than  someone who only does it about 25% of the time.  If we can observe a relevant behavior we might be able to infer an underlying attitude.

Of course, another option is to just ask.  There are many different approaches to measuring attitudes with self-report measures, but we'll focus on the most popular one: Likert scales. 

READ: Likert Scale

11-B: Implicit Attitudes

• How are implicit attitudes different from explicit ones?

• Why are implicit attitudes challenging to measure?

• How does the Implicit Association Test (IAT) attempt to measure them?

Before you do anything else, let's start by actually taking a test designed to try and discover whether or not you have a subconscious bias.  Be sure to save your results screen as a PDF for future reference - you will need it to answer a worksheet question.

NOTE: This is a reaction time test and will take about 10 minutes to complete. It is important that you do this free of distractions and that you try to be as fast and as accurate as possible.

• STEP 1: Visit http://ter.ps/savewebpdf for instructions on how to save your results screen.  You will need it to answer a worksheet question.

• STEP 2: Visit Project Implicit, read over the preliminary information and click "I wish to proceed."

• STEP 3: Select the Gender - Career test and try as hard as you can to be as fast and accurate as possible.  The harder you try the more valuable the results are to you.

• STEP 4: Save your results screen.

To understand what the test is trying to do, we have to understand what an implicit attitude is.  Implicit attitudes are essentially our automatic, subconscious evaluations… and in some cases they might be different from the explicit attitudes that we are aware of and would report on a self-report measure.  Within a fraction of a second our brain assesses what we see and makes judgments about it, so on a subconscious level we might not even be aware of the way we tend to feel about things.  The IAT is just one way that researcher have attempted to measure something that you cannot consciously describe for yourself. 

11-C: Balance & Dissonance

• How would you use Heider's Balance Theory to help explain the strategies and decisions of marketing companies who wish to influence your own personal attitudes?  Be prepared to provide different personal examples of balanced and imbalanced triads and to complete a missing symbol from a conceptual example

• What is dissonance, what causes it, what does it feel like, and what makes it go away?

• How did Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) demonstrate that dissonance can cause a change in our seemingly honest and objective opinions?  Be prepared to describe the IV, DV, procedure, and results.

READ: Fritz Heider's Balance Theory

Optional - you may also find it helpful to watch http://youtu.be/20iA3UUd1WA for an illustrated discussion of balanced and unbalanced attitudes.

Let's consider an example.  For-profit companies want you to have a general positive attitude towards their brands.  For example, Apple hired two actors and blitzed television with a strategic marketing campaign to leverage your subconscious preference for balance to manipulate your attitudes. 

Arguably, one of the most important theories in social psychology, cognitive dissonance theory, concerns what happens when we detect the imbalance.  The imbalance causes a negative arousal, sort of like a subconscious fight-or-flight reaction.  Our brain's goal, at that point, is to resolve the imbalance (dissonance) and restore mental harmony.  The scary thing is that if we're not paying attention, the judgments, decisions, and even feelings that seem objective might be biased by our natural instinct to reduce and avoid cognitive dissonance. 

11-D: Attribution and Biases

• What is the difference between dispositional and situational attributions?

• How do subconscious motivations influence our attributions?  Define, explain the cause of, and provide specific examples of:

  • The Fundamental Attribution Error

  • The self-serving bias

  • The confirmation bias

An important part of social psychology is understanding how we think about ourselves and other people.  Humans, as self-aware and social creatures, are wired not only to observe behavior, but to explain it.  After all, the better you understand yourself and the people around you, the better off you are.  Attribution is the process of assigning a cause to an event. 

We have two basic options... we can explain a behavior as evidence of a disposition (the internal, stable characteristics of the person) or having been caused by the situation (something external, beyond the person's control).

For example, what attribution comes to mind when you imagine:

1. A driver cuts you off and swerves across another lane to make a sudden turn.

2. You earned an "A" on a recent exam

3. A recent time that you were late to something important

Of course, our subconscious motivations influence our judgements and we do not always make attributions in the most logical and objective manner.

You have already learned about the confirmation bias in our second module, so now consider how it applies to attributions that you make about yourself and other people.  Imagine how that bias could influence the way you interpret a similar behavior between a close friend and someone you do not particularly care for.  For example, if your friend passed you in the hall and did not say hi, you might make a situational attribution and conclude that she must have been very distracted by something.  However, if someone you already do not like did the same thing, you might make a dispositional attribution and interpret that behavior as evidence that the person is not friendly.

Review your notes on the confirmation bias and consider your own examples for how preexisting beliefs, and our motivation to support them, can lead us to interpret behavior in different ways.  Also consider how, conceptually, the self-serving bias can be thought of as a specific example of the confirmation bias. 

11-E: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• How can our expectations influence our own behavior, and the behavior of others, in such a way that we actually cause our expectations to come true?

• How does this concept relate to the cognitive-behavioral approach to therapy?

• How did Rosenthal & Jakobson demonstrate that expectations could actually cause a change another person?  Be clear about the methodology and results, and consider the ethical concerns we might raise.

• What were the four ways in which the teacher's expectations affected the students?  For each, describe specific things you might witness if you were observing the classroom.

  • • Climate

    • Input

    • Response opportunity

    • Feedback

11-F: Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

• How can you relate the ABCs of attitudes to the distinction between stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination?  What is the connection between...

  • Stereotypes, schemas, and self-fulfilling prophecies?

  • Prejudice and implicit attitudes?

• How did Clark (1940) demonstrate that some young children in the United States had learned negative attitudes towards their own skin tone?

• Is a person more likely to be viewed as a threat based on their race?  What is the evidence that supports this?

  • Which people are biased to perceive black males as more threatening? Why?

• How did Sherif's "Robber's Cave" study demonstrate that prejudice, discrimination, and even hostility could result from competition for resources and status?  What sort of behaviors were observed?

• How did Sherif later reduce the tension between groups?  Why did that work?

We have already seen how what we think influence how we feel and what we do, so how does that relate to issues between groups?  We tend to think about other groups as having common attributes... after all, that's what makes them a member of that group.  Contained within our cognitive schema for that group are all of the traits that, in our memory, are associate with the group - the stereotypes.  We might believe that a group has both positive and negative traits, and we might even know about stereotypes that we personally do not believe are true.  Regardless, when the group primes your memory the stereotypes increase in accessibility and may therefore influence your thoughts, attributions, and subconscious behavior.

A prejudice is a negative attitude towards a group - it is the dislike that someone feels, perhaps very mild and subtle or perhaps outwardly hateful.  As we have seen, prejudice (like any attitude) can be explicit or implicit, and the two do not always agree.

It is, in theory, possible for someone to have stereotypes, feel prejudice, but not discriminate. Discrimination is the way you treat someone relative to the way that you treat people from other groups.  If you are just a mean jerk to everyone, or if you give raises to all of your employees, that's just your disposition.  However, if you ignore, act rudely to, or even try to hurt someone because of prejudice towards their group, or give bigger raises to employees because they are similar to you, that would be discriminatory.

WATCH: Revisiting an Experiment on Race

READ: Race and Threat

READ: The Robbers Cave Experiment