Which area of the brain is active when we automatically evaluate social stimuli?

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

ATTITUDES

In the beginning, social psychologists agreed that to know people’s attitudes is to predict their actions. In 1964, Leon Festinger observed that changing people’s attitudes often hardly affects their behavior. He believed that the attitude- behavior works the other way around, with our behavior as the horse and attitudes as the cart.

Attitudes – refers to beliefs and feelings related to a person or an event that is often rooted in one’s beliefs and exhibited in one’s feelings and intended behavior.

HOW WELL DO OUR ATTITUDES PREDICT

BEHAVIOR

 Allan Wicker – reviewed several research studies covering a variety of people, attitudes and behaviors and offered a shocking conclusion that people’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted their varying behaviors  The surprising finding that what people say often differs from what they do sent social psychologists to find out why.

WHEN ATTRIBUTES PREDICT BEHAVIOR  the reason why our behavior and our expressed attitudes differ is that both are subject to many other influences.  Our attitudes do predict behavior when these other influences on what we say and do are minimal, when the attitude is specific to the behavior, and when the attitude is potent

When social influences on what we say are minimal  Social psychologists measure expressed attitudes.  Expressions are subject to outside influences,  Implicit attitudes – our often unacknowledged inner beliefs that may or may not correspond to our explicit or conscious attitudes.  Implicit association test –. It is a computer-driven assessment of implicit attitudes. It uses reaction times to measure how quickly people associate concepts. Report of studies that involve the IAT shown that: o Implicit biases are pervasive – 80% of people show more implicit dislike for the elderly compared to the young o People differ in implicit bias – depending on their group memberships, conscious attitudes, and the bias in their immediate environment, some people exhibit more implicit bias than others o People are often unaware of their implicit biases – despite thinking themselves unprejudiced, even researchers themselves show implicit biases against some social groups. o Both implicit and explicit attitudes help predict people’s behaviors and judgements. o For attitudes formed early in life—such as racial and gender attitudes—implicit and explicit attitudes frequently diverge, with implicit attitudes often predicting behavior better. o For other attitudes such as those related to consumer behavior and support for political candidates, explicit self-reports are the better predictor o Amygdala – the brain region known for being a center for threat detection appears to be active as we automatically evaluate social stimuli o The IAT is not reliable enough to assess and compare individuals.  The existence of distinct explicit and implicit attitudes confirms one of psychology’s biggest lessons: our dual processing capacity for both automatic and controlled thinking

When other influences on behavior are minimal

Source: Source: Myers & Twenge – Social Psychology – McGraw Hill Education – 2015 AE-

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

 Social influences can be enormous enough to induce people to violate their deepest convictions.  Principle of aggregation – the effects of an attitude become more apparent when we look a t a person’s aggregate or average behavior.

When attitudes are specific to the behavior  Other conditions further improve the predictive accuracy of attitudes  When a measured attitude is a general one, and the behavior is very specific, we should not expect a close correspondence between words and actions  Theory of planned behavior – says that it is better to predict behavior by knowing people’s intended behaviors and their perceived self-efficacy and control  To change habits through persuasion, we must alter people’s attitudes toward specific practices

When attitudes are potent  Much of our behavior is automatic and we act out familiar scripts without reflecting on what we are doing.  This kind of mindlessness is adaptive and it frees our minds to work on other things. For habitual behaviors, conscious intentions are hardly activated.  Alfred North Whitehead - “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking them

Bringing attitudes to mind o Our attitudes become potent when we think about them. o To induce people to focus on their inner convictions, make them self- aware.

Forging strong attitudes through experience o The attitudes that best predict behavior are accessible as well as stable. o When attitudes are forged by experience, they are more accessible, more enduring, and more likely to guide actions

WHEN DOES OUR BEHAVIOR AFFECT OUR ATTITUDES?

 Behavior determines attitudes.  We stand up for what we believe, and we also come to believe in what we stand up for

ROLE PLAYING  Role – a set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave  When enacting new social roles, we may first feel phony, but our unease seldom lasts.  Role-playing studies concerns how what is unreal can subtly morph into something real.  When we act like those around us, we slightly change our former selves into being more like them

SAYING BECOMES BELIEVING

 People often adapt what they say to please their listener. They are quicker to tell people good news than bad, and they adjust their message towards their listeners views  When there is no compelling external explanation for one’s words, saying becomes believing.

EVIL AND MORAL ACTS  The attitude-follow-behavior principle also works with immoral acts. Evil sometimes results from gradually escalating commitments. A trifling evil erodes one’s moral sensitivity, making it easier to perform a worse act  We tend not only to hurt those we dislike but also dislike those we hurt.  Attitudes-follow-behavior phenomenon both appears in wartime and peacetime.  Actions and attitudes feed each other, sometimes to the point of moral

Source: Source: Myers & Twenge – Social Psychology – McGraw Hill Education – 2015 AE-

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

will be effective only when the authority is present.  Dissonance theory insists that encouragement and inducement should be enough to elicit the desired action.

Dissonance after decisions  The emphasis on perceived choice and responsibility implies that decisions produce dissonance.  When faced with an important decision, we are sometimes torn between two equally attractive alternatives  After making important decisions, you can reduce dissonance by upgrading the chosen alternative and downgrading the unchosen option.  Our preferences influences our decisions, which then sharpen our preferences. This choices-influence-preferences  Decisions, once made, grow their own self- justifying legs of support.

SELF PERCEPTION

 Self-perception theory – is the theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us—by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs.  The theory assumes that we make similar inferences when we observe our own behavior.  William James – more than a century ago, he proposed a similar self-perception process for our experienced emotion.  We infer our emotions by observing our bodies and our behaviors.

Expressions and attitude  Facial feedback effect – the tendency of facial expressions to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness.  Our expressions influence our feelings and imitating others’ expressions help is know what they are feeling as well according to a study.  Acting out a person’s emotion enabled the observers to feel more empathy.  Our facial expressions also influence our attitudes.

Overjustification and intrinsic motivations  People explain their behavior by noting the conditions under which it occurs. We

observe our uncoerced action and infer our attitude.  Rewarding people for doing what they already enjoy may lead them to attribute their action to the reward. This would undermine their self-perception that they do it because they like it,  Overjustification effect – the result of bringing people to do what they already like doing. They may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing.  An unanticipated reward does not diminish intrinsic interest, because people can still attribute their actions to their own motivation  The Overjustification effect occurs when someone offers an unnecessary reward beforehand in an obvious effort to control behavior  Rewards and praise that inform people of their achievements boost intrinsic motivation. Whereas rewards that seek to control people and lead them to believe it was the reward that caused their effort diminish the intrinsic appeal of an enjoyable task.  If students are provided with enough justification to perform a learning task and use rewards and labels to help them feel competent, we may enhance their enjoyment and their eagerness to pursue the subject on their own.

COMPARING THEORIES

 We have seen an explanation of why our actions might only seem to affect our attitudes, through the self-presentation theory  We also have seen two explanations, though contradicting each other, of why

Source: Source: Myers & Twenge – Social Psychology – McGraw Hill Education – 2015 AE-

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

our actions genuinely affect our attitudes. Self-perception theory assumes that we justify our behavior to reduce our internal discomfort.  Self-perception theory assumes that we observe our behavior and make reasonable inferences about our attitudes, much as we observe other people and infer their attitudes.  Daryl Bem – suggested it boils down to persona loyalties and preferences. This illustrates the human element in scientific theorizing. Neither dissonance theory nor self-perception theory has been handed to us by nature. Both are products of human imagination.

Dissonance as arousal  Strong support has emerged for dissonance theory.  Conditions that supposedly produce dissonance are indeed uncomfortably arousing, provided that the behavior has unwanted consequences for which the person feels responsible  Self-affirmation theory suggests that undesirable acts are embarrassing and make us feel foolish. They threaten our sense of personal competence and goodness.  Justifying our actions and decisions is therefore self-affirming. It protects and supports our sense if integrity and self- worth

Self-perceiving when not self-contradicting  Dissonance is uncomfortably arousing. That makes for self-persuasion after acting contrary to one’s attitudes. But dissonance theory cannot attitude changes that occur without dissonance.  When people argue in a position that is in line with their opinion, although a step or two beyond it, procedures that eliminate arousal do not eliminate the attitude change

 Dissonance theory successfully explains

what happens when we act contrary to clearly defined attitudes.

Source: Source: Myers & Twenge – Social Psychology – McGraw Hill Education – 2015 AE-

Which part of the brain is active when we automatically evaluate social stimuli?

Which of the following theories assumes that our actions are self

Which of the following theories assumes that our actions are self

What does cognitive dissonance theory focus?