PSYC 441 Lecture 2: What are Attitudes?

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 441
• Professor: Leandre R Fabrigar

Document Summary

Merely being labeled as part of a social group, causes you to like others of that social group & behave more like them: value expressive help to express central values that we hold, social adjustment foster social interaction and group cohesion (ex. groups of friends share common likes/dislikes that serve as a social cohesion/binding for their social relationships, many attitudes are not practical, but are useful in that they give us information about peoples" values, group membership, etc, functions served by attitudes, objects (cid:224) certain categories of attitudes for which we tend to form certain attitudes. Utility of the functionalist approach: knowing the functions of attitudes can give us insight into changing people"s attitudes and also insight into what sorts of behaviours those attitudes could predict, before changing an attitude, must understand which function the attitude is serving, and tailor your persuasive argument to that function, certain behaviours can also be influenced by the function of the attitude.