Chapter 4

• Attitude


  A favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone (often rooted in one's beliefs, and exhibited in one's feelings and intended behavior)
• Attitudes provide an efficient way to size up the world. When we have to respond quickly to something, the way we feel about it can guide how we react.
• The ABCs of Attitude

  Beliefs, Feelings, Behavior Tendency
• People's expressed attitudes hardly predicted their varying attitudes
• Moral hypocrisy


  Appearing moral while avoiding the cost of being so
• When attitudes predict behaviors


  • When social influences on what we say are minimal
• Zimbardo (1972) prison experiment

  Growing confusion between reality and illusion, between role-playing and self-identity, the prison they had created was absorbing them as creatures of its own reality
• Role


  A set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave
• Impression management


  In expressing our thoughts to others, we sometimes tailor our words to what we think the others will want to hear
• Foot-in-the-door phenomenon


  The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request (most of the time, this is voluntary)
• Low-ball technique


  A tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who agree to an initial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante. People who receive only the costly request are less likely to comply with it.
• A trifling act of evil will whittle away one's moral integrity, making a worse act easier to commit.
• Political and social movements may legislate behavior designed to lead to attitude change on a mass scale
• Aizen and Fishben theory of planned behavior

  Theory that explains why our behavior affects our attitudes
• Self-presentation theory


  Assumes that for strategic reasons we express attitudes that make us appear consistent
• Cognitive dissonance


  Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions. Assumes that to reduce discomfort, we justify our actions to ourselves.
• Insufficient justification effect


  Reduction of the dissonance by internally justifying one's behavior when external justification is insufficient
• Self-perception theory


  The theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us, by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs
• Over justification effect


  The result of bribing people to do what they already like doing. They may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing.
• Self-affirmation theory


  A theory that (a) people often experience a self-image threat, after engaging in an undesirable behavior, and (b) they can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self
• It seems that the theory of dissonance is a good description of what happens when we behave against clearly defined attitudes. We feel tension, so we adjust our attitudes to reduce it. Dissonance theory, then, explains attitude change.