Please number your answers Define implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes; then speculate how these impact each other.What did social psychology researchers learn from Milgram’s study and why is it

Week 4: PSYC.2090 Attitudes and Social Influence Lecture I: Attitudes (Chapter 7)

To start please open the link below, enlarge the window, and use the arrow key to go to each picture. For each picture indicate, as quickly as you can, whether you think it is good or bad. http://prezi.com/8npquc6fs6py/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

I. Attitude Components

Your ratings of good and bad indicate your attitude towards those objects. You can have an attitude toward just about anything (e.g., yourself, a person, a group of people, animals, concepts like freedom, consumer products etc.). There are a few things to consider about your attitudes:

1. Affect (p. 206-207). Your attitude toward an object consists mostly of just whether you think the object is good or bad (positive or negative). Research shows that people even have affective reactions (although fairly slight) towards fairly neutral objects (paper clips, belts).

2. Although your attitude consist of this positive/negative continuum. Attitudes also have a cognitive component (p. 207): these are your thoughts and knowledge about the object. For example, your attitude towards Apple products may consist of specific information you know about the capabilities of iphones.

3. There is also a behavioral (p. 207) component of attitudes. If you have positive affect towards an object then you tend to approach that object. If you have negative affect towards an object then you tend to avoid (move away from) that object.

To give you a sense of how advertisers try to connect with people affectively, please click on the link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urny4oFBbto

II. Attitude Measurement

Now I would like you to look over the questions below and think about what might be problematic about asking people these questions on a survey.

What is your attitude towards: 1. same-sex marriage?
2. the legalization of marijuana?

3. cheating on taxes?
4. a stigmatized social group (e.g., people who are gay, Black, Latino etc.)?

1. Explicit Measures. One of the main ways that researchers measure people’s attitudes is simply to ask them what their attitude is toward something (i.e., use self- report, which is an explicit measure, p. 207-208). But as you can see from the sample questions above, this straightforward way of asking people may be problematic for some types of topics. For some people these are controversial topics, and they may not want to tell the researcher their true attitude. They may simply tell the researcher what they think the researcher wants to hear (thus, they give a socially desirable response).

Now take a look at these questions: What is your attitude towards:
1. paper clips
2. kettles

3. belts

Now of course I’m being silly to illustrate a point. Many of you probably haven’t thought about your attitude towards these things and don’t really have an attitude towards them. This illustrates another problem with directly asking people their attitudes—they are not always aware what their attitude is towards something; note, however, may have an unconscious attitude toward some things.

2. Implicit Measures. To get around the problems of participants not wanting to say what their attitudes are or not being aware of their attitudes, many social psychologists try to measures people’s attitudes with implicit measures (p. 232-233)...measures in which people have a difficult time controlling their responses or are not aware that they are giving a response.

To see how advertisers want to tap into consumers unconscious desires select the link below and watch “The Persuaders” (from 30:48 to 36:05). Although the advertising guru’s method of getting at the unconscious is not up to standards of most psychology journals and therefore his theories don’t really have support, he does make some points

in line with current thinking about how we’re often not aware of our motives and behavior. .
https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-persuaders/

3. Attitude Strength. Think back to when you were rating the attitude objects as good or bad. How fast were you able to make these ratings? The speed at which you labeled something as good or bad (response latency, p. 208) could indicate the strength of your attitude toward this object (e.g., you really love Bieber and you respond quickly that he is good). Now you may have not thought that much about your attitude towards some things (paper clips), thus you may have been slower to say good or bad (thus your attitude toward paper clips is weak). You may have noticed that this is similar to how we discussed (in the Self chapter) being schematic or aschematic about something.

Next I’d like to answer whether you believe the following statements or not. 1. It is good for your health to eat vegetables.

2. It is good for your health to exercise.
3. It is good to recycle.
4. The right to vote is one of the most valuable rights of American citizens. 5. World hunger is a serious problem that needs attention.

Now answer the following questions. 1. Do you eat vegetables every day?

2. Do you exercise on a regular basis? 3. Do you always recycle?

4. Do you vote? Most students say yes to this...but they’re usually referring to national elections. Do you regularly vote in local elections?

5. Do you personally do anything to lessen world hunger (e.g., donate money or food or write your representative)?

III. Attitudes and Behavior

Now there is a good chance that you agreed with at least one of the statements in the above section (hopefully, you at least believe eating your veggies is good for your health). There is also a good chance that although you agreed with some of these statements, your behavior does not always match your beliefs. As noted in Chapter 7, the evidence that people’s attitudes were not that good a predictor of people’s behavior created a crisis for social psychology (because the study of attitudes was one of our biggest topics).

One of the reasons that attitudes do not always predict behavior is because sometimes there are things that influence our behavior that we’re not consciously aware of. The Science Friday audio features a lot of social psychological research on unconscious influences (Transcript is available on the site). The audio is a supplement to what our book covers on introspection (p. 236) and embodied cognition (p. 229-232). http://www.npr.org/2013/04/05/176339686/drunk-tank-pink-finds-clues-to-behavior

IV. Cognitive Dissonance

Let’s go back between the difference between your beliefs (about eating healthy) and your behavior (not eating healthy) for a second...do you feel bad when you think about how your behaviors don’t match your attitudes? Often when I ask students in class this question, the majority say NO (they don’t feel bad). If you don’t feel bad, then why don’t you?

According to cognitive dissonance theory, thinking about some of these discrepancies may initially make you feel bad (dissonance), but because we don’t like that feeling we engage in either mental processes or behaviors to make the two thoughts (cognitions)—

that we believe one thing and the thought that we’re not behaving according to our beliefs—consonant.

1. Reducing Dissonance. According to cognitive dissonance theory, there are three main ways to deal with dissonance: a) change our beliefs to fit with our behavior (eating veggies isn’t good for your health; b) change your behavior to match your attitudes (start eating your veggies); c) rationalize (yes, eating veggies is good for health but I’m too busy to cook them).

To further give you a sense of cognitive dissonance, the video below describes one of the classic cognitive dissonance studies (go from 20:55 to 25:50): https://beta.learner.org/series/discovering-psychology/judgement-and-decision-making/

2. Justification of Effort (p. 215-219). I imagine most of us have called some company’s customer service and have been put on hold for a really long time. Do you find that it is very difficult to hang up in these situations?...It can be a dilemma: I mean you’ve already invested so much time...it’ll be a waste to hang up (I’ve waited 4 minutes, what’s one more minute...and so on). This is kind of a cognitive dissonance effect. It’s very hard to quit something once you’ve put effort into it. Often (perhaps not in waiting on the line) but we feel we need to justify that effort—if we’ve put effort in to something then it must be worthwhile.

The audio clip below gives some you a good feel for how people (companies) can use cognitive dissonance to influence people’s behaviors. For the lecture, you just need to listen from 42:00 to 47:15 (however, I highly recommend listening to the whole show— it’s very interesting). http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/09/30/new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-the-upside- of-quitting/

Note that the Transcript is available on the site (click on “here” in the third paragraph). The conversation begins when Stacey VANEK SMITH begins to speak, and ends when Saloma FURLONG: begins to speak.

3. When won’t we experience dissonance? I noted before that the theory assumes that there are three ways to deal with dissonance. However, it is possible that people won’t experience dissonance to begin with. Our book already does a good job discussing these different ways (free choice, insufficient justification, negative consequences, foreseeability, and self-affirmation) on pages 246 to 250. I just want to add to that list an interesting study described in a Science Friday episode (it’s also a good example of embodied cognition). (Transcript is available on the webpage). http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126611413

V. Balance Theory: Cognitive Dissonance is called a consistency theory because it assumes that people want to be consistent. The audio below is on research that shows that even 9-month olds seem to show a preference for consistency. (Transcript is available on webpage). http://www.npr.org/2013/03/22/175054271/for-babies-its-better-to-like-what-i-like

VI. Overjustification effect (p. 230-231: Box 7.4). In our first lecture, I asked you to take a social psychology quiz. One of the findings was that if you reward a child for doing something she already likes doing (e.g., coloring) then she will tend to like that activity less. This is an example of the overjustification effect. One thing I like about the overjustification effect is that the logic is like the fundamental attribution error in reverse...according to the overjustification effect if we’re trying to decide whether we like something (coloring) for its own sake (internal attribution) but there is a external explanation salient (reward) then we tend to make an external attribution for our liking (I’m only doing this for the reward). So, if the external factor (reward) is no longer present then the person figures “why do the behavior?” As suggested above, this can be an “error” because the person initially liked the activity.

A lot of research shows that external rewards can hurt people’s motivation to do the behavior—if it hurts motivation then it is likely to hurt people’s performance. The video below covers research that shows that under certain circumstances (monetary) rewards can hurt people’s performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&t=27s

Additional Resource

In this Ted talk, A.J. Jacobs notes how behavior can change attitudes (living the Bible literally).
http://www.ted.com/talks/a_j_jacobs_year_of_living_biblically.html

Lecture II: Social Influence (Chapter 9)

I. Mimicry

In previous lectures, I’ve mentioned how we tend to mimic others, that we often do it unconsciously, and even that we tend to like those who mimic us (p. 272-274). This video clip features the one of the main researchers (Chartrand) studying mimicry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBKG525Fvus

There is even evidence that participants were more persuaded by a computer- generated character that programmed to mimic their behaviors than the same character who did not mimic their behaviors.

II. Social Rejection:

Before we start discussing conformity, let’s cover social rejection a bit (this isn’t covered in Chapter 9). As I’ve noted before, there seems to be a strong human need to belong. Remember, we evolved in social groups...and similar to other social animals (e.g., apes...even bees), our survival (especially in our past), depends on being accepted and included by the group. As such, groups ostracize and remove disruptive or unproductive group members. For example, Schacter (1951) demonstrated how groups respond to an individual

who ignores the group’s normative influence. In this study, participants who were put into small groups read a case history of a juvenile delinquent, and then to decide a sentence for the delinquent. However, there was a confederate in the groups who disagreed with the group’s recommendations. Schacter found that the dissenter received most of the communication from other group members until near the end (when it was clear that they couldn’t persuade the dissenter); then the others in the group began to ignore the dissenter. In addition, the group members recommended, in response to a survey, that the dissenter be removed from further group discussions.

On the flipside, we probably evolved to be very sensitive to rejection from the group. If we can sense when we’re going to be rejected from the group then maybe we can make some adjustments that will prevent such rejection and maintain our social standing. And if we are rejected, we tend to experience psychological costs. The video clip below shows neurological evidence that people are very sensitive to social rejection. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7EFYwUopf8

Now this research shows these effects even though the participants had just met the other group members and the task was inconsequential. Imagine how people feel being rejected by important others (family, close friends) on something that is important.

(This clip is also nice in that it potentially shows individual differences. Whenever we’re talking about research findings, we have to keep in mind these findings do NOT hold for all people. I say “potentially”, because we can never be too certain what’s happening in such a small sample.)

The main reason I’m covering social rejection is because it sets up one of the reasons we conform—we tend not to want to be rejected by others (see normative social influence below).

III. Conformity

There are two main reasons for conformity.

A. We tend to conform because we’re not sure what the correct behavior is in a circumstance, and so we look to others to determine what to do. This is known as informational social influence (p. 275-276)—we use other people as a source of information. This kind of conformity is most likely to occur in ambiguous situations. Thus, I think we can all imagine that if we were in a different country with a very different culture, we may look to others to see what’s the “right” way to behave in certain situations.

B. But even when we know the group isn’t right, we may conform. Thus, we sometimes conform because we don’t want to stand out from the group and because we fear social rejection. This kind of conformity is known as normative social influence (p. 276-279 The video below features Asch’s classic research on normative social influence (the line experiment).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDDyT1lDhA&feature=c4- overview&playnext=1&list=TLOQuGlaOc7i4

IV. Obedience

Before getting into the very serious topic of obedience and the social psychological research on obedience, let’s lighten the mood a little and just watch this Candid Camera prank. Note that people may even obey even when there is no authority figure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBa89XhxcTs

A. The Milgram Study: But what about when someone tells us what to do? Do we obey? Of course, when we talk about the social psychological study of obedience we think of the Milgram studies. The following clip features some of the original filming of one of Milgram’s studies as well as more current commentary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9l_puxcrlM&feature=c4- overview&playnext=1&list=TL0-6pT8Zr3WI

B. Milgram Revisited. A valid response is that the Milgram studies occurred in a different era—an era in which people may have respected authority figures more than they do today. Thus, we wonder whether doing the same study today would yield similar results. The clip below shows a replication of the study, which was aired in 2009. You just need to go from 3:10 to 9:40 (the beginning is all the same set up that you saw in the above clip of the Milgram study).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w

You may also wonder if Milgram’s findings generalize to people in other countries. Below is a table which lists other countries where the Milgram study was done, the year it was done, and the percentage of participants who gave the maximum electric shock to the “learner”.

C. Real World Obedience. In the first week we noted that often experiments can be artificial and don’t resemble what occurs in real life. The next video illustrates surprising obedience in the real world. You may have heard about this case in which a person pretending to be a police officer called fast-food restaurants and ordered the managers to strip search employees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mpAbig8ttY

V. Compliance

Sometimes we’re influenced by others not because they ordered us to do something, but because they simply asked us to do something—they made a request. We call this type of social influence, compliance (p. 286-290). As you can imagine, there is a lot of study on what tends to get people to comply. The clip below covers the tactics used by advertisers to get people to buy a product. Note that what Cialdini calls “commitment” is the same as “foot-in-the-door” technique described in the book (p. 289-290)...and that when he talks about “consensus” he’s talking about norm-based approaches (p. 292- 296 and just below). (go from 20:00 to 24:30). https://beta.learner.org/series/discovering-psychology/constructing-social-reality/

The next clip is a more updated version of what you just saw. Note that that the study that that they use to illustrate “consistency” is using the “foot in the door” technique”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFdCzN7RYbw

The above clips didn’t cover another technique known as the opposite of the foot-in- the—door technique; it’s called the door-in-the-face technique (p. 288-289). Here you

start with a big request (can I borrow a $100) that the person is likely to reject...then you move on to the smaller request (then can I borrow $10) to which the person is more likely to accept. It works because people feel like you’re making a concession when you adjust your request down, and they therefore feel like they need to reciprocate with their own concession.

(I once joked in a class that if you wanted to go on a date with somebody...that you could start with a big outlandish request “want to get married?” and when the person predictably says NO, then you could just ask “how about go out for some coffee”. A student from that class later told me he tried that technique and that the person he asked went out with him and that they were dating...I know the person might have said yes to coffee without the marriage proposal, but it’s always nice to think social psychology brought two people together.)

Norm-based influences. As illustrated in the clips above one way to get people to comply is to convey to them that other people are doing the same thing. Note that this is a heuristic—if other people are doing something then it must be the right thing to do— and that under a lot of situations this is a reasonable heuristics. However, it can lead us astray when a persuader (e.g., advertiser) creates the impression that something is a norm when it isn’t. (Note also that when people are being influenced by norms ...they are essentially conforming due to informational social influence.)

There’s an interesting and perhaps counterintuitive way norms can influence people. Let me introduce it by asking you a question: Do you think tax fraud would go up or go down if the IRS announced that it would increase the penalty for tax fraud given that a lot of people engaged in tax fraud the previous year? And why do you think tax fraud would go up or down? Now, please listen to the following audio clip (at around 5:30 to 7:12) to get an answer. (You also may want to listen to the whole show—it recaps some of what the above clips cover but gives different examples...it also can give you some examples for your paper.) The transcript is available on the webpage (read from “Can things back fire on you?” to “primitive message was more powerful than the penalty”).

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=93872977

Now the next clip I’d like you to watch covers some interesting work that suggests how a norm can be developed (this work is actually briefly mentioned in our book on p. 346 Norm-Based Approaches). You just need to watch from 2:30 to 8:20 (although you may want to start from the beginning to get more of the context). http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks. html

VI. Reactance Theory

Now, it’s not the case that people always obey or comply. Imagine that you’re getting back in your car in a parking lot...and there is another driver waiting for your parking spot. Do you say to yourself “oh this person’s waiting for my spot, I better get in the car, put on my seatbelt, start the car, and start driving as quickly as possible...so that the person can have the spot”? Or do you take your time? Perhaps you fumble with your keys, have a conversation with your friend before opening the door, have an extended stretch before putting on the seatbelt, check your teeth in the rearview mirror, find the perfect radio station. Ok, well that’s a bit much...but you see where I’m going. There is actually research that shows that people take longer to get out of a parking spot if another driver is waiting for the spot than if no one is waiting for the spot (Ruback & Juieng, 1997). It’s as if we feel crowded by the driver waiting and we react against what we think the person wants; that is, we do the opposite. This idea falls under Reactance Theory (p. 298).

Let me tell you about another study that illustrates this reactance (Pennebaker & Sanders, 1976). The researchers put up a sign in a restroom at university. In one condition, the sign essentially said “Do not write on these walls under no circumstances” and the other condition, the sign said “Please do not write on these walls”. The researchers found that there was more writing on the wall when the sign said “Do not

write on these walls under no circumstances” than when the sign had the other message.

Additional Resources

Mimicry

http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/the-situation-of-imitation-and-mimickry/

How twitter and other social media may influence people. If a lot of people seem to have a certain attitude then that can be influential. http://www.npr.org/2012/10/26/163712869/in-twitter-we-trust-can-social-media-sway- voters

Nonconformity (or even anti-conformity)

http://randyreport.blogspot.com/2011/12/holidays-house-decorations.html