PSY 240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 29: Twin Study, Theodore Newcomb, Twin

• School: Tunxis Community College
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 240
• Professor: Rondinone

Document Summary

Bennington was a women"s college that drew its students from conservative families. Once there, however, the students encountered professors and older peers who held more liberal views and as the women moved from their first year to graduation, they became progressively more liberal. Clearly, attitudes are formed through basic processes of learning. Example, studies have shown that people can form strong positive and negative attitudes toward neutral objects that somehow are linked to emotionally charged stimuli. In a study, when the participants evaluated the nationalities by name, they were more positive in their ratings of those that had been paired with pleasant words than with unpleasant words. More recent studies of evaluative conditioning have further shown that implicit and explicit attitudes toward neutral objects can form by their association with positive and negative stimuli, even in people who are not conscious of this association . People take for granted the notion that attitudes influence behaviour.