PSY 005 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Sexually Transmitted Infection, Safe Sex, Psy
4 Oct 2020
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Document Summary
Our beliefs about an object, person, or issue influence our attitude toward it. We tend to evaluate objects, people, and policies positively when we believe that they possess mostly positive characteristics, and we tend to evaluate them negatively when we believe that they possess mostly negative characteristics. Experiment: results showed that participants" attitudes toward these safer sex behaviours were strongly correlated with their beliefs about the positive and negative consequences of their behaviour. Experiment: researchers showed that priming a schema caused attitude ratings to move in the direction of the schema. Priming the schema of elderly persons led university students to express more conservative attitudes than participants in a control, no-priming condition. This increase the accessibility of cognitive information that was consistent with the schema, which then influenced attitudes. If we cannot directly access our internal states, we may infer them from our actions. Attitudes can be based on behaviour information, specifically past behaviour toward the target.
