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.
1.
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.
2.
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…
1.
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.
2.
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”.