All questions of Attitude and Social Cognition for Humanities/Arts Exam

If Sylvia always laughs at comedians then she is demonstrating high consistency and low distinctiveness, but no information is given about the consensus for the behaviour.

Counter-attitudinal advocacy involves presenting an attitude or opinion, within a role-play context, which opposes the person’s initial attitude.
Cognitive dissonance theory describes how people may feel an aversive tension when their behaviour is inconsistent with their attitude, and in order to reduce their discomfort, will change their behaviour to be consistent with their attitude.
Cognitive dissonance processes may occur when people perform a behaviour that strongly contradicts their initial attitude (Fazio, Zanna & Cooper, 1977).
Self-perception theory indicates that people may guess their own attitude from their behaviour towards the attitude object, particularly when they can see no external reasons for the behaviour. Self-perception processes may occur when people perform a behaviour that is not so strongly contradictory to their initial attitude (Fazio, Zanna & Cooper, 1977)

Cognitive dissonance theory explains that people adjust their attitudes to justify past behaviour in order to reduce inconsistency and the discomfort that this can bring to some people. Attribution theory and social learning theory do not explain attitude change. The actor-observer effect is a type of attribution. The theory of planned behaviour focuses on behavioural intentions, and not the attitudes themselves.

Self-report measures can be affected by people’s desire to state socially desirable attitudes. So while respondents may reveal negative attitudes towards immigrants in their behaviour, their self-reports may appear more positive because they are reluctant to seem prejudiced. Contemporary research therefore frequently uses non-self-report measures in cases like this – i.e., when people’s ability to rate their attitudes accurately is questionable.
Despite this weakness, self-report measures have predicted a variety of relevant behaviours in past research, which suggests that we are at least somewhat accurate in reporting our own attitudes. Some measures have been designed to elicit attitudes without relying on self-reports and without relying on overt behaviours towards the attitude object.

There is now strong evidence that people in non-Western cultures do not make the same kinds of attributions as people in Western individualistic societies. The fundamental attribution error, which was originally thought to be a universal cognitive bias, is not found in collectivist cultures. Instead, many non-Western people place less emphasis on internal dispositional explanations, and more emphasis on external and situational explanations (Shweder & Bourne, 1982).
Miller (1984) was among the first social psychologists to suggest that such differences arise from different cultural representations of the person that are learned during social development, rather than from cognitive and perceptual factors. Miller (1994) conducted a cross-cultural study to compare the attributions made for prosocial and deviant behaviours by a sample of Americans and Indian Hindus of three different age groups (8, 11 and 15 years) and an adult group with a mean age of 40.
Miller found a significant linear age increase in dispositional attributions among Americans, and a similar linear age increase in situational attributions for the Indian sample. It therefore appears that the FAE is very culture specific, and the cognitive and perceptual explanations originally advanced for the FAE need to be reconsidered in light of Miller’s findings.

Ajzen’s (1975) theory of planned behaviour stated that actual behaviour is influenced by behavioural intentions that are, in turn, influenced by:

Stereotypes are societally recognized mental representations of social groups and their members that include behavioural and trait characteristics about those social groups. Role and person schemas are individually-based, not societally-based, knowledge structures that help to categorise people and behavioural norms based on the traits or roles people express.

The UAE refers to the attributions made at the group level, to protect the group to which we belong. It does not underlie all other processes, apply only to ingroups, or occur at the individual level.

Research by Petty and colleagues has consistently identified high personal relevance as particularly important for the careful processing of messages, and affects how persuasive messages will be for inducing attitude change and behavioural intentions. Whether or not the message is funny or memorable do not appear to be key components to how carefully or deliberately the information is processed compared to personal relevance. When a message is not provided by an expert source, this can lead to less careful processing.

The three-component model includes three components to explain the content of attitudes: cognition, emotion and behaviour. The remaining answers are not the correct terms or combination of components that form the three-component model.

Both the Jones–Davis and the Kelley models of attribution view the social perceiver as a rational person who uses logical principles of thinking when attributing causality. But empirical research has discovered persistent biases in the attributional processes. According to Fiske and Taylor (1991), bias occurs if the social perceiver systematically distorts (over-uses or under-uses) what are thought to be correct and logical procedures. We will now look in more detail at four of the most pervasive biases: the fundamental attribution error, the actor–observer effect, the self-serving bias and the ultimate attribution error.

Before we can apply a schema to a social object, we have to categorize (or label) it as something – a book, a tree, an animal, or whatever. In other words, we identify objects, people and events as members of a category, similar to others in that category and different from members of other categories. Mostly we employ categories automatically and with little conscious effort. Categories help to impose order on the stimulus world, and are fundamental to perception, thought, language and action (Lakoff, 1987). Research on categorization stems from the pioneering work of cognitive scientist Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues (Rosch, 1975; 1978).
The categorization of social objects, people and events is assumed to be a more complex process than categorization of inanimate objects because social objects are variable, dynamic and interactive. Nevertheless, members of a social category share common features. Some instances contained in the category are considered to be more typical than others – the most typical, or prototypical, representing the category as a whole.

McGuire’s (1969) extended version of Hovland, Janis and Kelley’s (1953) model of attitude change stated that a message will elicit the desired behaviour only if it succeeds at the following six stages. People must:

Interestingly, even if the odds of passing each stage are quite good, the chances of completing all the stages can be low. For this reason, modern marketing initiatives take steps to compel completion of each stage, where this is possible. So advertisers will present the message many times, make it attention-grabbing and memorable, and make the message content as powerful as they can.

Multiple-act criterion is the term used to refer to the assessment of multiple behaviours relevant to the attitude being measured, which has been shown to be a better indicator of the actual relationship between people’s attitudes and behaviour specific to those attitudes. The other terms included above are not used to refer to this type of assessment.

Automatic processing of information about people is beyond conscious awareness and extremely fast whereas controlled processing is deliberate, conscious and strategic. Schematic, revised, subtype and evaluative are not terms used to describe the type of information processing by Devine.

It is well known that people tend to accept credit for success and deny responsibility for failure. More generally, we also tend to attribute our success to internal factors such as ability, but attribute failure to external factors such as bad luck or task difficulty. This is known as the self-serving bias. Although the strength of the self-serving bias varies across cultures, it has been found to occur cross-culturally (Fletcher & Ward, 1988; Kashima & Triandis, 1986). The usual explanation for the self-serving bias relates to motivational factors: that is, the need for individuals to enhance their self-esteem when they succeed and protect their self-esteem when they fail.
Attributing success to internal causes has been referred to as the self-enhancing bias, and attributing failure to external causes as the self-protection bias (Miller & Ross, 1975). But Miller and Ross argue that there is only clear support for the self-enhancing bias, and that people do often accept personal responsibility for failure.
They also claim that the self-enhancing bias can be explained by cognitive factors without recourse to motivational explanations. For example, we are more likely to make self-attributions for expected than unexpected outcomes, and most of us expect to succeed rather than fail. It is difficult to argue against the motivational hypothesis, and the prevailing consensus is that both motivational and cognitive factors have a part in the self-serving bias (Ross & Fletcher, 1985).

All of the above have been identified as specific qualities of schemas that contribute to their utility in helping us organize and manage social information.

Attitudes, subjective norms and perceived control influence intentions, which in turn influence actual behaviour, according to the theory of planned behaviour. Objective norms are not included in this model.

Well-developed schemas that are activated frequently resist change and persist, even in the face of disconfirming evidence. So a male chauvinist with a highly accessible and frequently activated stereotype that women are less capable than men is rarely convinced otherwise, even when presented with evidence to the contrary. Consistent with the ultimate attribution error described above, instances that disconfirm the stereotype are treated as ‘exceptions to the rule’. This notion is consistent with the subtyping model of stereotype change, which predicts that disconfirming instances of the stereotype are relegated to ‘exceptional’ sub-categories or sub-types that accommodate exceptions while leaving the overall stereotype largely intact (Weber & Crocker, 1983).
There is considerable empirical support for the sub-typing model (Hewstone, 1994; Johnston & Hewstone, 1992). Other models have received less empirical support. These include the book-keeping model, which proposes that there is constant fine-tuning of a schema with each new piece of information (Rumelhart &
Norman, 1978), and the conversion model, which proposes that there is dramatic and sudden change in the schema in response to salient contradictions (Rothbart, 1981).