Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Attitudes: evaluations that can color our experience of virtually any aspect of the world

Explicit: Consciously accessible and easy to report

Implicit: Not consciously accessible or controllable

Social learning: many of our views are acquired by interacting with others, or simply observing their behavior

• Classical conditioning: Learning based on association
  • subliminal conditioning: occurs in the absence of conscious awareness of the stimuli involved (e.g. photos shown for a very brief period of time)
  • mere exposure
• Instrumental conditioning: Rewards for doing a certain behavior
• Observational learning: When individuals acquire attitudes or behaviors by observing others

Social networks: sets of individuals with whom we interact on a regular basis

Social comparison: our tendency to compare ourselves with others to determine whether our view of social reality is or is not correct

Link between attitudes and behavior:

• Situational constraints: may prevent us from expressing our attitudes overtly
• Pluralistic ignorance: believing that others have different attitudes than we do, which can limit our willingness to express our attitudes in public
• These factors can make our attitudes more likely to guide our behavior:
  • extremity of our attitude position
  • the certainty with which our attitudes are held
  • whether we have personal experience with the attitude object
• Theory of planned behavior: the decision to engage in a particular behavior is the result of a rational process
• Attitude-to-behavior process model: in situations where our behavior is more spontaneous, and we do not engage in deliberate thought, attitudes influence behavior by shaping our perception and interpretation of the situation

Persuasion: efforts to change attitudes through the use of message

• We process persuasive messages in two different ways:
  • systematic processing: involves careful attention to message content
  • heuristic processing:  involves the use of mental shortcuts (e.g., “experts are usually right”)
• Resistance to persuasion:
  • reactance: negative reactions to efforts by others to reduce our personal freedom
  • forewarning: the knowledge that someone is trying to change our attitudes
  • When ego-depleted, people experience greater difficulty self-regulating, which undermines resistance to persuasion

Maintaining current attitudes

• Selective avoidance: the tendency to overlook or disregard information that contradicts our existing views
• Selective exposure: actively seeking out information that is consistent with our existing attitudes

Cognitive dissonance:  an unpleasant state that occurs when we notice discrepancies between our attitudes and our behavior

• Less-leads-to-more effect: less reasons or rewards for an action often leads to greater attitude change
• Forced compliance: when we are induced by external factors to say or do things that are inconsistent with our attitudes
• Trivialization: concluding that the inconsistency is unimportant
• Indirect strategies: to the extent that the self can be affirmed by focusing on some other positive feature of the self, then dissonance can be reduced without changing one’s attitudes
• Dissonance that is induced by making us aware of our own hypocrisy can result in behavioral changes

Cultural tightness versus looseness: cultures differ dramatically in the extent to which people are expected to act in ways that are consistent with prevailing social norms

Reference: 

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited

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