PS270 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Self-Justification, Gender Role, Totalitarianism
Document Summary
Attitude: a favourable/unfavourable evaluative reaction toward something or someone, exhibited in one"s beliefs, feelings, or intended behaviour. Three components of attitudes: affect (feeling, behaviour (tendency, cognition (thoughts) Only expressed attitudes are measured by social psychologists; expressions are subject to outside influences. Psychologists have developed ways to minimize outside influences on peoples attitudes reports: some complement traditional self report of explicit (conscious, some measure implicit (unconscious attitudes) attitudes) Implicit association test (iat): a computer driven assessment of implicit attitudes. The rest uses reaction times to measure people"s automatic associations between objects and evaluative words. Easier pairings & faster responses) are said to indicated strong unconscious associations. Both implicit and explicit attitudes measured together are the best way to predict behaviour. Role playing role: a set of norms that define how people in a given social position ought to behave. Norms: rules for accepted and expected behaviour.