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Social Cognition (Attitudes: (Factors affecting attitudes (Attitude…
Social Cognition
Attitudes:
Structure of Attitudes:
Behavioural Component:
How your attitude influences your behaviour – actions we do in response to an object
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Affective Component:
How you feel about the person, object or issues. Emotional reaction that is based on judgement
4 Major Functions of Attitudes:
Attitudes help a person to mediate between their own inner needs (expression, defence) and the outside world (adaptive and knowledge)
Ego Defensive:
Shielding oneself from the harsh realities and protecting our self esteem
• Eg. avoid going travelling because you don’t want to deal with the stress before hand
Utilitarian/adaptive:
maximising rewards, minimising punishments. Holding socially accepted attitudes can reap social rewards such as acceptance
Self Expressive:
letting the world know what your attitude is by:
- communicating who we are
- positive feelings from asserting self identity
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Bidirectional link:
• Attitudes influence behaviour and behaviour influences attitudes
• some attitudes are not conductive to achieving success in learning. A defensive attitude that projects our problems onto something or someone else does not give us the opportunity to learn and change
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functions of Prejudice
Ego-Defensive:
• to protect our self-esteem
• functions refers to holding prejudice that protect our self-esteem or that justify actions that make su feel guilty
Utilitarian function:
• generates social or economic rewards
• if a person holds and/or expresses socially acceptable prejudice, other people will reward them with approval and social acceptance
Self Expressive:
• some attitudes are important to a person becuase they express values that are intelgral to a person's slef concept (ideas about who they are)
• attitude is consequently apart of who they are and the expression of the attitude communicates important things about that person to others
Knowledge:
• prejudice also allows people to organise and structure their world in ways that make sense and are relatively convenient
• prejudice allows a person to avoid dealing with individuals on an individual level, thus making many social decisions quick and easy (stereotypes) based on the other group membership, one knows whether or not to interact and how to approach that interaction if it should occur
• of course, problems occur when this knowledge proves to be faulty.
Overcoming Stereotypes
The Sub-typing Model:
• new sub-categories of the stereotype are created to take into account the new information
• information inconsistent with the stereotype will lead to the creation of a new sub-stereotype to accommodate the new information without changing the initial stereotype
The Conversion Model:
• Little evidence that this happens but suggests that the stereotype can change in response to a powerful and salient (prominent) piece of information
• the conversion model says that a strongly inconsistent piece of information will lead to a radical change in the stereotype
The Book Keeping Model:
•Each piece of new information modifies the stereotype
•Each piece of information inconsistent with a stereotype will lead to its modification
•Predicts that prejudice is likely to be gradually reduced if the perceived is confronted with more and more disconfirming information
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Reducing Prejudice:
Contact Hypothesis:
• essentially states that increased contact with the group you hold prejudice about will decrease prejudice towards that group