SOCIAL COGNITION IN PSYCHOLOGY
Social cognition focuses on the ways in which people think about other people and how those cognitions influence behavior toward those other people.
ATTITUDE can be defined as a tendency to respond positively or negatively toward a certain idea, person, object, or situation ( Triandis, 1971). This tendency, developed through people’s experiences as they live and work with others, can affect the way they behave toward those ideas, people, objects, and situations and can include opinions, beliefs, and biases. Attitudes influence the way people view these things before they’ve actually been exposed to them (Petty et al., 2003).
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THE ABC MODEL OF ATTITUDES
Attitudes are actually made up of three different parts, or components,
AFFECTIVE COMPONENT The affective component of an attitude is the way a person feels toward the object, person, or situation. Affect is used in psychology to mean “emotions” or “feelings,” so the affective component is the emotional component. For example, some people might feel that country music is fun and uplifting.
BEHAVIOUR COMPONENT The behavior component of an attitude is the action that a person takes in regard to the person, object, or situation. For example, a person who feels that country music is fun is likely to listen to a country music station, buy country music MP3s, or go to a country music concert.
COGNITIVE COMPONENT The cognitive component of an attitude is the way a person thinks about himself or herself, an object, or a situation. These thoughts, or cognitions, include beliefs and ideas about the focus of the attitude. For example, the country music lover might believe that country music is superior to other forms of music.
ATTITUDE FORMATION
Attitude formation is the result of a number of different influences with only one thing in common: They are all forms of learning. DIRECT CONTACT One way in which attitudes are formed is by direct contact with the person, idea, situation, or object that is the focus of the attitude. For example, a child who tries and dislikes brussels sprouts will form a negative attitude about brussels sprouts.
DIRECT INSTRUCTION Another way attitudes are formed is through direct instruction, either by parents or some other individual. Parents may tell their children that smoking cigarettes is dangerous and unhealthy, for example.
INTERACTION WITH OTHERS Sometimes attitudes are formed because the person is around other people with that attitude. If a person’s friends, for example, all hold the attitude that smoking is cool, that person is more likely to think that smoking is cool as well (Brenner, 2007; Eddy et al., 2000; Hill, 1990; Shean et al., 1994).
VICARIOUS CONDITIONING (OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING) Many attitudes are learned through the observation of other people’s actions and reactions to various objects, people, or situations. Just as a child whose mother shows a fear of dogs may develop a similar fear.
ATTITUDE CHANGE: THE ART OF PERSUASION
The art of persuasion : the process by which one person tries to change the belief, opinion, position, or course of action of another person through argument, pleading, or explanation.
Persuasion is not a simple matter. There are several factors that become important in predicting how successful any persuasive effort at attitude change might be. These factors include the following:
Source: The communicator is the person delivering the message. There is a strong tendency to give more weight to people who are perceived as experts, as well as those who seem trustworthy, attractive, and similar to the person receiving the message (Eagly & Chaiken, 1975; O’Keefe, 2009; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986, 1996; Priester & Petty, 1995).
Message: The actual message should be clear and well organized (Booth- Butterfield, 1996). It is usually more effective to present both sides of an argument to an audience that has not yet committed to one side or the other (Crowley & Hoyer, 1994; O’Keefe, 2009; Petty & Cacioppo, 1996; Petty et al., 2003). Messages that are directed at producing fear have been thought to be more effective if they produce only a moderate amount of fear and also provide information about how to avoid the fear-provoking consequences (Kleinot & Rogers, 1982; Meyrick, 2001; Petty, 1995; Rogers & Mewborn, 1976). More recent research suggests that fear messages with a higher amount of fear may be very effective when they not only provide information about how to avoid the consequences but also stress the severity of those consequences, particularly among women (Tannenbaum et al., 2015).
Target Audience: The characteristics of the people who are the intended target of the message of persuasion are also important in determining the effectiveness of the message. The age of the audience members can be a factor, for example. Researchers have found that people who are in the young adult stage of the late teens to the mid-20s are more susceptible to persuasion than are older people (O’Keefe, 2009; Visser & Krosnick, 1998).
Medium: The form through which a person receives a message is also important. For example, seeing and hearing a politician’s speech on television may have a very different effect than simply reading about it in the newspaper or online. The visual impact of the television coverage is particularly important because it provides an opportunity for the source of the message to be seen as attractive, for example.
THE ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD MODEL OF PERSUASION : assumed that people either elaborate (add details and information) based on what they hear (the facts of the message), or they do not elaborate at all, preferring to pay attention to the surface characteristics of the message (length, who delivers it, how attractive the message deliverer is, etc.).Two types of processing are hypothesized in this model:
CENTRAL ROUTE PROCESSING type of information processing that involves attending to the content of the message itself.
PERIPHERAL ROUTE PROCESSING type of information processing that involves attending to factors not involved in the message, such as the appearance of the source of the message, the length of the message, and other non content factors.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: WHEN ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOUR CLASH
cognitive dissonance sense of discomfort or distress that occurs when a person’s behavior does not correspond to that person’s attitudes.(Dissonance is a term referring to an inconsistency or lack of agreement.)
When people experience cognitive dissonance, the resulting tension and arousal are unpleasant, and their motivation is to change something so that the unpleasant feelings and tension are reduced or eliminated. There are three basic things that people can do to reduce cognitive dissonance:
1. Change their conflicting behavior to make it match their attitude.
2. Change their current conflicting cognition to justify their behavior.
3. Form new cognitions to justify their behavior.
IMPRESSION FORMATION
When one person meets another for the first time, it is the first opportunity either person will have to make initial evaluations and judgments about the other. That first opportunity is a very important one in impression formation, the forming of the first knowledge a person has about another person. Impression formation includes assigning the other person to a number of categories and drawing conclusions about what that person is likely to do—it’s really all about prediction.
There is a primacy effect in impression formation: The first time people meet someone, they form an impression of that person, often based on physical appearance alone, that persists even though they may later have other contradictory information about that person (DeCoster & Claypool, 2004; Lorenzo et al., 2010; Luchins, 1957; Macrae & Quadflieg, 2010).
SOCIAL CATEGORISATION One of the processes that occur when people meet someone new is the assignment of that person to some kind of category or group. This assignment is usually based on characteristics the new person has in common with other people or groups with whom the perceiver has had prior experience. This social categorization is mostly automatic and occurs without conscious awareness of the process (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Vernon et al., 2014). Although this is a natural process (human beings are just born categorizers, sometimes it can cause problems.
STEREOTYPE, a belief that a set of characteristics is shared by all members of a particular social category (Fiske, 1998). Stereotypes (although not always negative) are very limiting, causing people to misjudge what others are like and often to treat them differently as a result.
Social categorization does have an important place in the perception of others. It allows people to access a great deal of information that can be useful about others, as well as helping people remember and organize information about the characteristics of others (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). The way to avoid falling into the trap of negatively stereotyping someone is to be aware of existing stereotypes and apply a little critical thinking: “Okay, so he’s a guy with a lot of piercings. That doesn’t mean that he’s overly aggressive—it just means he has a lot of piercings.”
IMPLICIT PERSONALITY THEORIES The categories into which people place others are based on something called an implicit personality theory. Implicit personality theories are sets of assumptions that people have about how different types of people, personality traits, and actions are all related and form in childhood (Dweck et al., 1995; Erdley & Dweck, 1993; Plaks et al., 2005).
E.g.- idea that happy people are also friendly people and people who are quiet are shy. Although these assumptions or beliefs are not necessarily true, they do serve the function of helping organize schemas, or mental patterns that represent what a person believes about certain “types” of people.The schemas formed in this way can easily become stereotypes when people have limited experience with others who are different from them, especially in superficial ways such as skin color or other physical characteristics (Levy et al., 1998).
There is a test designed to measure the implicit attitudes that make up one’s implicit personality theory, called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Greenwald et al., 1998). The test, taken by computer, measures the degree of association between certain pairs of concepts.
ATTRIBUTION
The process of explaining one’s own behavior and the behavior of others.
CAUSES OF BEHAVIOUR : Attribution theory was originally developed by social psychologist Fritz Heider (1958) as a way of not only explaining why things happen but also why people choose the particular explanations of behavior that they do. There are basically two kinds of explanations— external and internal causes.
1)When the cause of behavior is assumed to be from external sources, such as the weather, traffic, educational opportunities, and so on, it is said to be a situational cause.For example, if John is late, his lateness might be explained by heavy traffic or car problems.
2) if the cause of behavior is assumed to come from within the individual, it is called a dispositional cause. In this case, it is the person’s internal personality characteristics that are seen as the cause of the observed behavior.
There’s an emotional component to these kinds of attributions as well. When people are happy in a marriage, for example, researchers have found that when a spouse’s behavior has a positive effect, the tendency is to attribute it to an internal cause (“He did it because he wanted me to feel good”). When the effect is negative, the behavior is attributed to an external cause (“She must have had a difficult day”). But if the marriage is an unhappy one, the opposite attributions occur: “He is only being nice because he wants something from me” or “She’s being mean because it’s her nature to be crabby” (Fincham et al., 2000; Karney & Bradbury, 2000).
The best-known attributional bias is the FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR, which is the tendency for people observing someone else’s actions to overestimate the influence of that person’s internal characteristics on behavior and underestimate the influence of the situation. In explaining our own behavior, the tendency to use situational attributions instead of personal is called the actor–observer bias because we are the actor, not the observer. In other words, people tend to explain the actions of others based on what “kind” of person they are rather than looking for outside causes, such as social influences or situations (Blanchard-Fields et al., 2007; Harman, 1999; Jones & Harris, 1967; Leclerc & Hess, 2007; Weiner, 1985).
One study has found that attribution of motive may also create conflict between groups (Waytz et al., 2014). The study compared Israelis and Palestinians in the Mideast as well as Republicans and Democrats in the United States. Obviously, these groups continue to experience a great deal of animosity, conflict, and an unwillingness to shift from long held beliefs. Over the course of five studies, in which participants were asked to rate the motives of others for engaging in conflict, researchers found that each side felt that their side was motivated by love more than hate but that the other side’s motivating force was hate. Calling this idea motive attribution asymmetry, the researchers suggest that this is at least one reason compromise and negotiation are so difficult to obtain—if the other side hates you, you believe them to be unreasonable and negotiations impossible.
