Chapter 6 — Attitude and Social Cognition

An attitude is a state of the mind — a set of views or thoughts regarding an attitude object — that has an evaluative feature (positive, negative, or neutral). It is accompanied by an emotional component and a tendency to act in a particular way regarding the attitude object.

A stands for the Affective (emotional) component, B for the Behavioural (conative, i.e. tendency to act) component, and C for the Cognitive (thought) component. Together these three aspects make up any attitude, though predicting one component from the other two may not always give the correct picture.

Beliefs refer to the cognitive component of attitudes, such as belief in God or democracy. Values are attitudes or beliefs that contain a 'should' or 'ought' aspect — for example, that one should always be honest — and are difficult to change because they become an inseparable part of the person's outlook on life.

The four properties are: Valence (whether the attitude is positive, negative, or neutral), Extremeness (how positive or negative it is), Simplicity or Complexity/multiplexity (how many member-attitudes exist within a broader attitude system), and Centrality (how much a particular attitude influences the other attitudes in the system).

Attitudes are formed through: learning by association (linking positive or negative qualities to an object), learning through reward and punishment, learning through modelling (observing others being rewarded or punished), learning through group or cultural norms, and learning through exposure to information via media, biographies, and other sources.

Four major factors influence attitude formation: (1) Family and school environment — parents and other family members shape early attitudes through association, rewards/punishments, and modelling; (2) Reference groups — groups whose norms about acceptable behaviour individuals adopt; (3) Personal experiences — direct experiences that can drastically change one's attitude; (4) Media-related influences — audio-visual media and the Internet that strengthen cognitive and affective components of attitudes.

Fritz Heider's balance concept represents the relationships among P (the person whose attitude is studied), O (another person), and X (the attitude object) as a triangle. Imbalance occurs when all three relationships are negative, or when two are positive and one is negative. Because imbalance is logically uncomfortable, one attitude changes in the direction of balance.

Cognitive dissonance was proposed by Leon Festinger. When two cognitions within an attitude are dissonant (logically inconsistent), one changes to restore consonance. In the Festinger and Carlsmith experiment, students paid only $1 to call a boring experiment interesting experienced dissonance and later recalled the experiment as genuinely interesting; those paid $20 did not change their attitude.

S.M. Mohsin, an Indian psychologist, proposed that attitude change occurs in two steps. In Step I, the target (person whose attitude is to change) identifies with the source (person of influence), developing mutual liking and regard. In Step II, the source actually changes their own attitude and behaviour towards the attitude object, and observing this, the target also shows an attitude change through behaviour — a form of observational learning.

No. Richard LaPiere, an American social psychologist, found that a Chinese couple was served by hotels across the United States with almost no refusals during travel, yet when hotel managers later received questionnaires, a very large percentage said they would not accommodate Chinese guests. This showed that attitudes may not always predict actual behaviour.

Consistency is more likely when: the attitude is strong and holds a central place in the attitude system; the person is aware of their attitude; there is very little external pressure to behave otherwise; behaviour is not being watched or evaluated by others; and the person believes the behaviour will have a positive consequence and intends to engage in it.

Prejudice is a negative attitude towards a particular group, often based on stereotypes (cognitive component), accompanied by dislike or hatred (affective component). Discrimination is the behavioural component — acting in a less positive way towards the target group. Prejudice can exist without discrimination and vice versa, but the two often go together, and wherever both exist, conflicts between groups within a society are very likely.

Social psychologists identify five sources: (1) Learning — through association, reward/punishment, modelling, group norms, and media; (2) Strong social identity and ingroup bias — boosting one's own group by holding negative attitudes towards outgroups; (3) Scapegoating — a majority group blaming a minority outgroup for its own social, economic, or political problems; (4) Kernel of truth concept — assuming stereotypes contain some truth; (5) Self-fulfilling prophecy — the target group behaving in ways that confirm and strengthen the existing prejudice.

Three key strategies are: (1) Education and information dissemination to correct stereotypes and address strong ingroup bias; (2) Increasing intergroup contact — direct communication reduces mistrust, but only when groups meet cooperatively rather than competitively, have close interactions, and are not different in power or status; (3) Highlighting individual identity rather than group identity, weakening the importance of ingroup-outgroup evaluation.

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