QUESTIONS : Attitudes, Attributions and Social Cognition

QUESTIONS : Attitudes, Attributions and Social Cognition
1. Why are attitudes important constructs in social psychology?
2. If you were interested in predicting whether people’s attitudes towards low-fat foods predict their consumption of low-fat foods, which model of attitude-behaviour relations would you use to examine this issue, and why?
3. Imagine that you are designing a new ad campaign against careless driving. Using your knowledge of models of attitude change, how would your ads look and where would you place them?
4. Why are attributions important constructs in social psychology?
5. It could be suggested that the ‘fundamental attribution error’ is not really an error, because it helps us form useful judgements in a complex social world. Discuss the pros and cons of this argument.
6. Given the effects of culture on the occurrence of the fundamental attribution error, how would you set up an intervention to make people less likely to commit this ‘error’?
7. Why are schemas important constructs in social psychology?

Attitudes, Attributions and Social Cognition

Attitudes, Attributions and Social Cognition

People often try to influence others. Salespeople urge customers to buy goods or services; politicians exhort people to vote for them; dating partners try to make a good impression on each other; managers attempt to maintain employees’ dedication to work; and advertisers try to raise interest in consumer products. In all of these examples, people try to make others like or dislike particular objects, ideas, individuals, groups or tasks.Attitudes are tendencies to like or dislike something – such as an idea, person or behaviour – and the object of these tendencies (the thing beingliked or disliked) is often called the attitude object.Attitudes indirectly or directly affect behaviour in virtually every social interaction. This is why the study of attitudes and attitude change is a fundamental area of social psychological research.We will tackle each of these questions before turning to a related topic – attribution theory. In everydaylife, we try to make sense of events and the behaviour of other people. Why did I get so angry in the meeting yesterday? Why did Sally leave Harry? Why does Hannah’s baby have leukemia? Why did Manchester United fail to make the cup final this year? Attribution theory is the process of deriving causal explanations for events and behaviour – an important field of investigation in social psychology. The Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider (1958) saw this process as part of a commonsense or naïve psychology – a basic property of human thinking that fulfils a need to predict and control the environment.The final topic of this chapter binds the first two topics together. Attitudes and attributions summarize vast amounts of information from our complex social world. How do we process this information? And how do we use it to make judgements and draw inferences? These questions are central to the study of social cognition. Many of the concepts and experimental methods central to this field have been borrowed from work in
cognitive psychology. But, while cognitive psychologyconcerns itself with how we perceive physical stimuli and objects, social cognition focuses on the perception and processing of social objects, such as people, social groups and events. attitude object the thing (e.g. idea, person, behaviour) that is accorded a favourable or unfavourable attitude
attribution an individual’s belief about causality