PSYC 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Cognitive Dissonance, Social Identity Theory, Implicit-Association Test
31 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
An area of psychology that seeks to understand, explain, and predict how people"s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. The way in which people perceive and interpret themselves and others in their social world. Relatively stable and enduring evaluations of things and people. Attitudes have 3 components: the affective component how people feel toward an object, the behavioural component how we behave toward an object, the cognitive component what we believe about an object. Parents play a major role in shaping children"s attitudes: in older children, peers, teachers, and mass media also exert an influence. Proposed that people change their attitudes when they experience cognitive dissonance: a state of emotional discomfort that arises when a person holds two contradictory beliefs or holds a belief inconsistent with his behaviour. This state is so unpleasant that we are motivated to reduce/eliminate it, therefore modify our existing beliefs.
