Unit IV Essay

• Weight: 11% of course grade
• Grading Rubric
• Due: Tuesday, 12/07/2021 11:59 PM (CST)

Instructions

In this assignment, you will assess how your attitudes and behaviors connect in order to understand how cognitive dissonance as a cognitive process can influence the way you think and what attitudes you hold. This assignment is divided into three parts, so it is suggested that you begin working on it in advance.

Part I: Pick a debatable issue that you think is important to address in society today (e.g., universal healthcare). Write a paragraph discussing why you care about and agree with the importance of this issue, and why others should care about this issue as well. Allow one day before moving on to the next part.

Part II: Make sure at least one day has passed since writing the first paragraph. Now, write another paragraph detailing what you personally do to promote this viewpoint. What actions do you take to support this cause? How have you specifically contributed to promoting this issue in the recent past? You will include both of these paragraphs in your essay.

Part III: To complete your essay, identify your chosen topic in an introductory section and include your paragraphs from Parts I and II. Then, reflect on your previous responses by addressing the following points.

1. Discuss the differences between your arguments from the first paragraph (in which you show the importance of the topic) and the second paragraph (in which you discuss how you personally act on your viewpoint). Are your attitudes about the importance of the issue reflected in your behaviors (i.e., is there dissonance between your attitudes and your behaviors)? How do you feel about the level of dissonance between your attitudes and behaviors?
2. Elaborate on whether you think that your opinion of the importance of this topic has changed, particularly thinking about your initial thoughts on the topic before you wrote either paragraph.
3. Briefly describe how experiencing cognitive dissonance about a debatable issue may make a person more susceptible to social influence, such as conformity, from others who hold opposing opinions.

Throughout your discussion, incorporate research on cognitive dissonance from your textbook or another resource to support your claims.

 

STUDY GUIDE

Unit Lesson Attitudes and Persuasion As humans have a tendency to evaluate, attitudes are positive or negative evaluations about people, things, or ideas (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). Social psychologists suggest that attitudes are primarily shaped by your social experiences, including the ABCs of psychology—affect, behavior, and cognitions. Cognition-based attitudes are those created by a person’s belief about an attitude object. Affect-based attitudes are attitudes created from a person’s feelings and how much he or she values an attitude object. Behavior-based attitudes are any attitudes based on behavioral observations toward an attitude object. How do these components of attitudes apply to the real world? Do you utilize one component more than the other, and if so, why? Do you think people are aware of the type of information they rely on when forming their attitudes? A person can hold dual beliefs about an attitude object. For example, you may love eating an oversized ice cream sundae while understanding that it is not a healthy food choice. When it comes to the execution of attitudes, however, most often they are presented as a unidirectional outcome, such that you either like something or you do not (i.e., in the case of the ice cream sundae, you like it). This ability can help streamline

 

UNIT IV STUDY GUIDE

 

Attitudes, Persuasion, and Social Influence PSY 3140, Social Psychology 2 UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title decisions and judgments in one’s environment because attitudes frequently guide behaviors. Another way one can relate attitudes with behavior is through the specificity principle. The specificity principle suggests that if you are interested in investigating a specific or general behavioral outcome, the strongest results will arise by investigating attitudes at a similarly specific or general level (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). If you are interested in assessing whether a person will be more likely to purchase an ice cream sundae for dessert, you should measure that person’s attitude toward ice cream sundaes specifically, rather than desserts in general. Sometimes your behaviors do not correspond to your attitudes. To help explain this phenomenon, Fishbein and Ajzen (as cited in Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019) created the theory of planned behavior. This theory describes how your attitudes are one category of beliefs that predict planned, deliberate behavior. In this theory, your behaviors are influenced not just by your attitude toward the behavior but also by your opinions about the prevalence of the behavior (i.e., subjective norms) and the ease to which you can perform the behavior (i.e., perceived control). Considering all three components allows for a more accurate prediction of future behaviors. Thinking about this theory, can you see how it might be used to explain your behavior and the behavior of the people in your life? Reflecting on some of the big questions of social psychology, nature and nurture do interact in the development of attitudes, but, as noted above, most research focuses on the role of experience. People learn beliefs and opinions in many forms and from many sources in the environment. We can develop attitudes based on exposure to and imitation of what others demonstrate, and we can learn associations between things in the environment based on personal experiences and outcomes of those experiences. Each of these pathways can lead to thinking and acting on individualized attitudes and can be particularly strong if the thoughts and actions were rewarded in the past. There are two ways to measure attitudes: implicitly and explicitly. Explicit attitudes are those that you are actively aware of, including those attitudes that you could easily identify. For instance, you might be asked directly about your attitudes concerning snakes.

 

Implicit attitudes represent your attitudes that are involuntary, uncontrollable, and unconscious. These attitudes are not able to be examined directly through self-report. How might you measure implicit attitudes? Research on this topic is still developing, but the most famous measure is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which taps into what automatic associations and the strength of those associations, one has acquired from the environment in which he or she lives. You can learn more about how implicit attitudes are assessed through the IAT by completing this unit’s learning activity. Many people encounter situations in which their belief that they are a decent person (an attitude about who they are) is challenged. When they encounter such challenges, they feel discomfort. This phenomenon has been thoroughly studied in social psychology and is known as cognitive dissonance (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). For more information on this phenomenon, view the video below: Luttrell, A. (2016, July 7). Cognitive dissonance theory: A crash course [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y17YaZRRvY To access a transcript of this video click here. If you experience cognitive dissonance, what can you do to reduce it? There are three ways that you can reduce cognitive dissonance. 1. You may be motivated to change your behavior to fit with the dissonant attitude. 2. You may be motivated to justify your behaviors through changing the dissonant attitude. 3. Finally, you may be motivated to justify your behaviors by adding new attitudes. Can you recall a time when you personally engaged in any of these dissonance-reducing strategies? PSY 3140, Social Psychology 3 UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title There is evidence that people all over the world experience dissonance, but they experience it in different situations. In interdependent cultures, people are more likely to experience dissonance when they have shamed or disappointed others and, thus, face the threat of group rejection (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). In addition, while changing one’s attitudes unnecessarily (e.g., to justify a poor decision or wasted time) can be perceived as a negative outcome, cognitive dissonance can be motivating for positive behavioral change (e.g., increasing healthy food choices), as well. What leads you to say “yes?” What changes your attitudes beyond the concept of cognitive dissonance? Researchers have studied persuasion for a long time. To explain when you are influenced by the persuasiveness of a message, Petty and Cacioppo (1986) developed the elaboration likelihood model. According to this model, there are two ways that persuasive communication can change your attitudes: the central route to persuasion and the peripheral route to persuasion. The central route involves people elaborating on persuasive arguments while actively processing the content of the message. On the other hand, the peripheral route does not involve people elaborating on the arguments. In the peripheral route, people are persuaded by the superficial characteristics surrounding the message. The message learning approach tried to simplify the process of attitude change by identifying four key factors. Hovland et al. (1953) suggested attitudes are shaped by who provides the source of communication, what (i.e., the nature of the message), to whom (i.e., the nature of the audience), and how (i.e., in what context the message is presented). From there, it is a matter of paying attention, understanding the message, and ultimately, yielding to it. In either case, it is probably not surprising that source variables, such as credible speakers and attractive speakers, are likely to change your attitudes on a topic. If you have ever seen a commercial advertisement with a celebrity or a doctor (usually an actor) in a white coat, you were exposed to a persuasive message relying on the peripheral route. Interestingly, your attitudes also vary based on the personal relevance of the topic (a message variable). That means that when an issue is really important or relevant to you, you are more likely to be persuaded by the quality of the argument than how much expertise the speaker possesses. When the context produces an audience that is distracted, they are likely to be more influenced by persuasive messages, and recipient variables, such as higher education levels, lead to less influence by persuasive messages because they can focus on argument quality (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). In addition to these types of variables, specific techniques have been developed to gain compliance to persuasive messages.

 

Take a moment to consider what type of persuasive communication you think most influences your attitudes or decisions to purchase a product. Social Influence: Conformity, Social Roles, and Obedience Social influence is all around you, as situational factors exert implicit, unspoken and explicit, formally stated expectations upon your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Implicit expectations include conformity, a voluntary change in behavior to imitate the behavior of others, and social roles, how certain people are supposed to look and behave. Explicit expectations include compliance, behavior in response to a request, and obedience, behavior in response to an order from a higher-status figure (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). In any case, behavior is often modified to fit the social norms we have learned for particular social situations over time and can even be contagious! Have you ever encountered a situation in which you were unsure of how to think or act? In such situations, you rely on the behaviors of others to determine what you should do, known as informational social influence (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). Think about times you might have done this. Sometimes you do this when it comes to standing in line or when you are not exactly sure of how to behave in a situation. You sometimes conform, not because you are weak-minded but because a situation is ambiguous, and the behaviors of others help you determine how to act. Sometimes people conform to the behaviors of others when they believe that these people are correct, which is often expressed internally or privately. People also conform to informational social influences when the situation is a crisis and other people are experts. Many times, crises are ambiguous and you do not have much time to determine a solution. In the previous chapter, you learned PSY 3140, Social Psychology 4 UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title how the expertise of a speaker could persuade you. Therefore, it should not be surprising that when someone has more knowledge about an ambiguous situation, this person serves as a guide. Sometimes you conform to be liked and accepted by others, a phenomenon known as normative social influence (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). Why might people conform in order to gain acceptance and liking from others in the group?

 

Usually, you are susceptible to such influences in public situations. In a classic series of experiments, Asch (1951, 1956) investigated normative social influence. In these experiments, Asch used line judgments in which participants were asked to judge the lengths of different lines and then match a target line to one of three lines. In each of the trials, the correct answers were obvious. Participants in the experiment were confederates of the researchers, except one, who was the true participant. In two out of the three trials, the confederates agreed on incorrect answers, and surprisingly, so did the actual participant. After the experiment, participants were interviewed, and they indicated that they did not want to feel differently or look foolish for disagreeing, even though they often knew they were providing the incorrect answer. Have you ever heard the phrase, “clothes make the man”? Often, the roles we hold in society come with a prescribed way of dressing that helps signify our position and take away the uncertainty of what behaviors we will enact, whether that be positive or negative. A classic study on how social roles aid in conformity was conducted by Haney et al. (1973). The study replicated a prison setting and investigated how the self disappeared by taking on a social role of prisoner or guard, complete with uniforms and schedules similar to those in an actual prison setting. The study quickly showed that deindividuation, or replacing self-awareness with a social role or group identity, such that one loses a sense of their individuality, can lead people to do things that they would not normally engage. In other words, the participants conformed rather completely to their social roles (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019).

 

You can learn more about the Stanford prison experiment and whether the results hold up today by watching the video below: ClickView Pty Limited (Producer). (2007). The Stanford prison experiment (Custom Segment 69) [Video]. In Classic Studies in Psychology. Films on Demand. https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?auth=CAS&url=http://fod.infobase.com/PortalPla ylists.aspx?wID=273866&xtid=40125&loid=506883 The transcript for this video can be found by clicking the “Transcript” tab to the right of the video in the Films on Demand database. Another classic experiment on the topic of conformity was conducted by Stanley Milgram (1974). In the aftermath of World War II, he became specifically interested in examining the power of obedience to an authority figure, as those on trial for war crimes frequently provided this reason for their actions. Deceptively, participants were told that the purpose of the study was to examine the effects of punishment on learning. In the experiments, participants were always in the role of the teacher and their partner, who was a confederate, was always the learner. Each time a learner made a mistake, the teacher had to deliver an electric shock, increasing the level of shock for every mistake. When the learner protested, the experimenter insisted that the participant continue. Most participants continued with the electric shocks, even after the learner protested, and 65% of participants administered the maximum level of electric shock. Milgram conducted many replications of his original study and found several situational factors that influenced whether someone was more or less likely to obey an authority figure, including proximity to the learner Peer pressure or the pressure to act or dress a certain way, are examples of normative social influence. (Godfer, 2014) PSY 3140, Social Psychology 5 UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title (victim), legitimacy of the authority figure, and whether other people were also delivering shocks. While there were those participants who rebelled against the authority figure, recent investigation suggests that others were willing volunteers committed to helping further a noble cause, in this case, science (Heinzen & Goodfriend, 2019). R