Ch 15

• Attitudes directly or indirectly influence every social interaction
• Attitudes and attitude change are fundamental areas of social psychological research to understand ourselves, others, and evaluate the world we live in
• Attitudes are a complex combination of personality beliefs, values, behaviors, and motivations that define our identity, guide our actions, and influence how we judge people around us
• Attitudes cause us to behave in particular ways towards objects, people, or events and define our favorable and unfavorable evaluations of things around us
• Attitudes are relatively enduring organizations of beliefs, feelings, and behavioral tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events, and situations
• Attitudes consist of three components: effective, behavioral, and cognitive
• Effective component:

  • Refers to the emotional part attached to a particular attitude
  • Direction and intensity of a person's evaluation or emotion towards the attitude object
• Behavioral component:

  • Likelihood of acting in a certain manner towards the attitude object
  • Refers to past behaviors or experiences regarding an attitude object
• Cognitive component:

  • Refers to the thinking part and development of beliefs about the attitude object
  • Thinking that brings about the development of belief about the attitude object
• Attitudes are held for a long time and change with new experiences, influenced by socialization and interaction with the social world
• Attitudes serve functions such as understanding the world, organizing and structuring experiences, describing social groups, understanding self-concept, and getting support, praise, and acceptance from others
• Attitudes are learned through interaction with others and can be changed with new learning
• Attitude change depends on factors like the source, message strength, and the person's capacity to change
• The relationship between attitude and behavior is complex, with strong and consistent attitudes better predicting behavior
• Beliefs help us understand why people behave in a certain way and predict behavior and events
• Social cognition involves how we think and make judgments about the social world around us, using schemas to organize information
• Attribution is understanding the causes of behavior, with internal and external attributions influencing our thoughts
• Errors or biases in social cognition include fundamental attribution errors, negativity bias, positivity bias, counterfactual thinking, and confirmatory bias