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Week 2 - Attitudes, stereotyping and predjucie
Introduction To Psychology: Developmental, Social & Clinical Psychology (PSYC1030)
University of Queensland
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PSYC1030 – Attitudes, Prejudice and Stereotyping
Learning objectives
- Explain what attitudes are and why they might be useful
- Understand and explain the relationship between attitudes and behaviour
- Describe the factors that contribute to attitude change and explain the process of attitude change
- Understand the role of cognitive consistency in the attitude-behaviour relationship and explain the fundamentals of cognitive dissonance theory
Attitude
Referred to whether an individual has a positive or negative personality Association between a behaviour or object and an evaluation Tri-partite model – beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies
Values
Judgement of what is important in life (not to be confused with attitude) Not linked to a particular thing or behaviour For example – you might value achievement in life but attitudes by definition are linked to a specific thing, if you value achievement or doing well in life you have an attitude of doing well in this course
Opinion
Verbal expression of an attitude What we say our attitude is This is different to attitude as sometimes what we say does not match what we think You’ve recently met someone and started dating, time to have dinner at parent’s house (first time) Father has prepared special meal and says he hopes you like it, your date has forgotten to mention that you are vegetarian You could say how much you love roast chicken, but an attitude could be you cant have chicken because you/re vegetarian
Schemas
Store our scripts for what happens at events and our knowledge about certain groups of people are like Attitudes however suggest how people feel about objects and behaviours Schemas don’t always have this feeling component
Attitude-behaviour relations
1934, Richard Lapierre set out to test whether attitudes relate to behaviour He travelled with a young Chinese student and the student’s wife over a 2-year period Visited 251 hotels, auto camps and tourist homes in USA Negative response due to Chinese people’s attitudes towards Americans (1930’s period) Served by all but one establishment (99%) 6 months later when he asked the establishments he had visited to ask if they would serve him and the Chinese individuals, less than 1% said they would serve Chinese guests 7% said it would be circumstantial 91% said they would not serve them at all Attitudes and behaviours of people working int these places didn’t match Wicker in 1969 also concluded a lack of relationship between attitudes and behaviour Lapierre critiqued because the gap in his study was that he was potentially he was measuring one person’s behaviour and another’s attitude as there could’ve been different people answering his phone call and serving
Ways to measure attitude and behaviour
Do not measure attitude for example, towards saving the environment Behaviour is specific to recycling
Principle of compatibility
Attitudes and behaviours will be related when they are measured in the same way
Idea that you need to measure attitudes and behaviours in a way that is similar or compatible
4 things into account
Target – focus of behaviour
Action - behaviour itself
Time - when behaviour is enacted
Context – situation that the behaviour is enacted in
For e., interested in measuring the relationship between attitudes towards recycling behaviour, compatible measures might look like this
To measure attitudes, we would ask “to what extent do you support recycling all paper, tins, and plastic over the next two weeks in your home?”
Then to measure behaviour
“Over the last two weeks to what extent did you recycle all paper, tins, and plastic in your home?”
Target – all paper, tins and plastic
Action – recycling
Time – over the next or last two weeks
Context – in your home
Principle of Compatibility
Expect a specific attitude would predict a single behaviour rather than a general attitude A general attitude measure would predict a general behavioural index (collection of behaviours) Attitudes are not good predictors of behaviours as other variables may become important, such as social norms You think one thing, but your friend has a different attitude, and you went along with your friends it fit in Persuasiveness as well
McGuire’s Chain of Persuasion Model
Presentation Attention Comprehension Yielding Retention Behaviour
All must happen successfully to influence your behaviour
- Describe the factors that contribute to attitude change and explain the process of attitude change
Sleeper effect is a concern when in contexts such as election campaigns, advertising, jury trials where people must retain information for an extended period and then make a judgement based on this information
In essence if we understand the message the person who said it doesn’t matter because we forget who it comes from
Attractiveness
Advertisements use attractive actors Attractive and likeable people will be more persuasive Attractive people have attributes apart from their looks that make them attractive such as being optimistic and more fluent speakers (not correlated) due to people like to talk to attractive people so they practice this more to speak more clearly
Self-monitoring
Idea that those who were more highly attuned, the high self-monitors should find attractiveness a particularly engaging social cue
2 conclusions
Those of us driven by internal values and ideas, low-self monitors attractiveness seems to be a simple cue to persuasion For those more attuned to external social sues, attractiveness helps grab our attention and gets us to think more carefully about the persuasive message
Message factors – Using fear
Janis and Fischbach the Grim Reaper AIDS commercial is one of the best known uses of fear in advertising. In 1987, the Australian government made this commercial, and used actors dressed up as the grim reaper––the cloaked skeletons in the video––to make people fearful of HIV and AIDS. The grim reapers were shown at a bowling alley, and they were bowling down people, not bowling pins. These were everyday people... mums, dads, young people, and old people. The government was hoping that the use of fear would change people’s attitudes towards safe sex. Strong fear version emphasised painful consequence of tooth decay and deceased gums – described other health threats associated with poor dental health including blindness and kidney damage Moderate fear – dangers were described in a less threatening way Low fear – focused on how teeth developed and what functions they serve Group of participants with the low fear message who went along with the message the most
Boomerang effect
High fear message can have increased resistance and deter people away
We tend to use the “Peripheral” route when the issue is not so important to us, when there is limited time to think about the message, or when we are distracted.
Cognitive Misers
Recipients like to use minimal amount of effort in cognitive effort as possible Mental sluggards
Heuristic Systematic (Chaiken, Liberman & Eagly 1989 model)
Cognitive preonance
Festinger thought that under some circumstances, a person would have a more positive attitude towards something when receiving a small reward compared to a large reward This prediction is counter-intuitive Fundamental drives or motivations is to maintain cognitive consistency Any inconsistency (dissonance) and so we are motivated to reduce it by changing one of the cognitions, generating new cognitions, that store consonance or by minimising the important of one or more of the cognitions that are inconsistent Precise method we use for dissonance reduction depends on the constraints of reality for example – most readily changeable cognition is the attitude especially if somebody else daw th person behaving in the way that they did Once behaviour has been performed in front of another person it is difficult to deny that you have behaved in that way Festinger theory was that cognitive consistency rather than reinforcement was an important determinant of behaviour Experimental study tested this study Carlsmith 1959 study
A confederate is someone who pretends to be another participant but in reality, is working with the experimenter
Testing cognitive consistency
Festinger & Carlsmith (1959) study
Behaviour – this cognition is fixed, the behaviour was performed in front of both the experimenter and new participant
Attitude – thinking the tasks were boring
Reward – a $1 or $
Compare cognitive consistency to the behaviour because it is fixed
Attitude is inconsistent with the behaviours as the tasks were said to be boring However, reward was consistent with saying the tasks were fun
However, saying the tasks were fun and getting paid only $1 is not consistent Now there are two pairs of inconsistent cognitions and there is twice the amount of dissonance in this condition compared to $20 condition
Therefore, participants rated this more enjoyable, they were experiencing dissonance
Dissonance is aversive – were motivated to reduce that unpleasant feeling so they did this by changing the only thing they could – attitudes
Grasshopper experiment
Phillip Zimbardo 1965
Army recruits’ participants on their attitudes on a variety of foods Asked if they were willing to eat a fried grasshopper from a tin Experimenter was treating participant nicely or meanly Then asked how they like what they ate at the end Y axis – amount of attitude change, X ais – nice experimenter, mean experimenter Replicates the same Festinger Carlsmith theory $20 condition is the nice experimenter and $1 is like the mean experimenter It’s not consistent for us to do things for people we don’t like Participants who ate grasshopper from mean experimenter experienced more dissonance, but they resolved this by changing their attitude and became more positive and liked the snack the most
Prejudice and Stereotyping
Prejudice – refers to the prejudgement or initial opinion we form before we get to know them better
Also refers to unfavourable attitudes people may have towards a social group and its members Something other than your personality, so your appearance, tattoos etc. Social psychologists aim to reduce social prejudice in society
Perry and Colleagues
People living with chronic stress with sexism and racism have been found to be more likely to take their lives
Stereotype
An exaggerated idea of what a group of people are like Negative stereotypes Becomes dysfunctional when it is negative, not based on reality and willing to modify (more similar to prejudice)
Three components of prejudice
Cognitive
Refers to beliefs Beliefs about a group example (stereotype) Some people feel guilty about stereotyping as it is prejudice It is impossible to avoid stereotyping Sensitive to categorical characteristics of groups of people, this can be helpful but also can work against us
Rules of thumb
Make assumptions Use schemas that help us get through Without this it would be impossible to get through the information we encounter everyday
Affective
Negative feelings about another group (resentment or disgust) How they feel towards a certain group
Behavioural
Discrimination Denied opportunities due tot heir gender, disability, sexuality and so forth Intention to behave negatively towards a group and its own members
Stereotypes about men and woman
Women
Warm and expressive Nice Not to competent Contrast to past domestic stereotype now in modern society that women go out to uni and typically do better in uni also
Men
Sigmund Freud
Seen as to think about sports, cars, and sex Competent, ambitious, doers and independent
Kernel of truth
Stereotypes originate because they are somewhat true and are based on reality Seed of truth, stereotype is a great exaggeration of this seed, so it is based on something Some stereotypes you cannot find evidence for (robust type that women are kinder and more patient, crush under pressure than men but there is no evidence for this stereotype Characteristics that actually differ and not in a stereotype is how much women move their body compared to men, women are more expressive and animated than men Another is people think that men talk about sex more than women, but it is found that this is the opposite
Behavioural interpretation and sub-typing
Behaviour is interpreted through a stereotype
Lens – stereotype is like a lens or filter which we see reality through
Anything can be seen as a sing of arrogance because you’re seeing them through that lens that they are arrogant (seeing evidence for your assumption, and constantly feel like you’re getting a kernel of truth) Cohen 1981 experiment found that participants remembered stereotype consistent with the occupation more than an occupation that is not associated with a women This shows me see reality through a lens of the stereotype and constantly accept evidence that support our lens
Subtyping
Benevolent sexism seems to be positive attitude whilst hostile sexism towards men or women seems negative Belief that women are incompetent, or inferior compared to men inherently trying to take men’s power Benevolent sexism looks like sexism (chivalry) Both come from a fundamental belief that women come from an inferior belief that women are less than men Men score higher than women on hostile sexism scale Same levels of benevolent scale (subscale) Two subscales remain positively associated with people who endorse hostile also endorse benevolent Prevalent beliefs in wider range of cultures People tend to subtype women and direct their different forms of prejudice their hostile or their benevolent sexism towards different subtypes so for example women who challenge men for power (feminism and career women are negatively evaluated by those who encourage and endorse hostile sexist views) Benevolent sexism endorses positive groups like housewives or women who don’t overly challenge the status quo Bot hostile and benevolent sexism retain women in the ideology that women are inferior to men Hostile sexism looks like any other prejudice, negative evaluations of women in a workplace especially those who challenge for a higher place in the workplace men who endorse hostile sexism tend to be less satisfied in their relationships because of their fundamental beliefs of women essentially women wanting to take their power away hostile sexism can have a motivating impact on women to prove them wrong benevolent sexism can sound positive but have an unhappy undertone, women have more trouble identifying this causes long term effects (cardiovascular reactivity, less intense and is a slow burn) because of its ambiguous nature
Racial stereotyping
it was assumed that races differed in terms of intelligence, sophistication, and morality these led to ideologies of eugenics (Hitler) rare to see some races are inferior to others Katz and Braly 1933 – study people’s attitudes towards different racial groups Differentiated characterise between white Americans and black African Americans Gilbert 1950 and Karlins 1969 replicated this called the “Princeton trilogy” studies
Karlins et al study 1967
Assigned traits such as “musical, happy-go-lucky, pleasure loving and ostentatious” as a characteristic of black Americans -
“Industrious, intelligent and alert” has declined for white Americans and instead to ambitious and materialistic and pleasure loving – negative traits Research has found that regardless of race, almost all stereotypes have become more favourable Black American groups have improved over the years Maybe we live in a more politically correct era In 1933 is was more accepted to view black Americans as lazy and ignorant
Aversive racism
People don’t like to be accused of being racist and go out of their way to show that they are not Some negative feelings still simmer underneath Gaertner and Dovido in 1986 – argued that aversive racism most people are motivated to maintain a non-prejudiced self-image They find racial prejudice aversive and endorse fair treatment of all groups and fear appearing prejudiced Can harbour subconscious racism White and black candidates were the same for white and black people, three types were strong, ambiguous, and weak qualifications Self-reports of prejudice were lower in 1998 compared to 10 years prior Both time periods, white participants did not favour the white candidate when both candidates were clearly strong or weak Viewed black more favourably than the white strong or weak qualifications However, recommended white candidates when qualifications were ambitious
Implicit Association Test
Developed by Anothony Greenwald, Debbie McGhee and Jordan Schwartz in 1998 as a measure to detect automatic associations people between objects and stereotypes
Stereotyping and Race
Stereotypes can taint people When looking through the stereotype lens, neutral and unthreatening behaviour can be interpreted as sinister and aggressive and can have tragic consequences Duncan in 1976 had a group of white participants to watch TV while showing which they thought was a live conversation between a black man and a white man The conversation then degenerated into an argument slightly shoving each other White participants found black man more aggressive in his shoves whereas the white man just as playing around Reality people see is quite different Individuals were more likely to attribute situational factors when the light shove was performed by the white man and were more likely to attribute personal factors with the black mans shove Results demonstrate concept of violence is more accessible to the black man than white man
Interview with Jolanda Jetten on prejudice
Targets who are being stereotyped affecting these people If you belong to a stigmatised group facing discrimination It can have negative effects on physical and mental wellbeing, greater likelihood of heart conditions, diabetes and engaging in unhealthy behaviours like smoking and drinking More likely to be depressed and have anxiety disorders Some people choose to be associated with these groups due (face piercings, tattoos etc.) to the thought of expressing who they are and that they belong and build a sense of identity around the stigma The more people face discrimination belonging to a particular group the more likely they want to stay in that group (like a club)
Fear of reporting discrimination
Stereotype of minorities is that they like to talk about their discrimination they face Stereotype is that minorities who attribute to failures due to discrimination are less likeable than those who “take it on the chin” People seem to understand negative consequences of claiming discrimination
Researchers asked by people why they thought they failed a test or an interview, people are reluctant to say that they are discriminated against However, if it was sexism, woman massively overestimate to confront the sexism head on
Stereotype threat
When they feel they are at risk of conforming to stereotypes
Teachers may make more eye contact to smarter students and reinforce their learning and challenging the differently or teaching them with more respect Showed teachers assumptions influenced them to create their own reality
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Week 2 - Attitudes, stereotyping and predjucie
Course: Introduction To Psychology: Developmental, Social & Clinical Psychology (PSYC1030)
University: University of Queensland
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