PSYC 215 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Logical Reasoning, Beautiful Music
25 Feb 2013
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Our susceptibility to persuasion and our resistance to it. Attitudes guide behavior, although less powerfully than most people expect. Serve a utilitarian function: an attitudinal functions that serves to alert people to rewarding objects and situations they should approach and costly or punishing objects or situations they should avoid. These attitudes are often activated by our current goals. Illustrated by our food preferences (attraction to vitamin filled sweet foods and distaste to bitter, toxic foods) Evolutionary psychologists say we prefer landscape which has water, trees, a far horizon because our ancestors needed this. We have positive attitudes towards this because of the evolutionary advantages these attitudes conferred on those who possessed and acted on them. People"s attitudes towards things can be changed by pairing them with emotionally arousing stimuli like pleasing odours or electric shock. Serve an ego-defensive function: an attitudinal function that enables people to maintain cherished beliefs about themselves and their world by protecting them from contradictory information.
