Test: Attitude and Social Cognition- 1 - Humanities/Arts MCQ

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.

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)

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

• the attitude towards the behaviour – the individual’s evaluations of the positive and negative consequences of performing the behaviour;
• the subjective norms regarding the behaviour – the individual’s desire to behave in the same way as people who are important to him think he should behave; and
• perceived control over performance of the behaviour – the extent to which the individual believes he can control whether he performs the behaviour.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Stereotypes are not only internal cognitive phenomena but also social and cultural explanations shaped by widely shared representations within a society, community or group. Because they are acquired early in life, widely shared and pervasive, stereotypes of groups are more than just ‘pictures in our heads’. They are socially and discursively reproduced in the course of everyday communication (Augoustinos & Walker, 1998).
They are also ideological in nature, because they are often used to rationalize and justify why some groups are more powerful and more dominant than others (Jost & Banaji, 1994). So social stereotypes can be used as political weapons to justify existing group inequalities, gender stereotypes have been used to justify gender inequalities, and race stereotypes have been used to justify racism and prejudice.
As well as being energy-saving devices that facilitate cognition by simplifying reality, stereotypes (and the social categories on which they are based) are viewed within other frameworks as rich in symbolic meaning, and as being used to make sense of the power and status relations between different social groups (Oakes et al., 1994; Leyens, Yzerbyt & Schadron, 1994).