PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Cognitive Dissonance, Implicit Attitude, Terror Management Theory
Chapter 7: Attitudes, Behaviour, and Rationalization
Components and Measurement of Attitudes
• An attitude is an evaluation of an object along a negative or positive dimension; it
includes three core components: affect (emotion), cognition (thoughts and knowledge),
and behavior (the tendency to approach or avoid the object)
o Affect is how much someone likes or dislikes an object
o Cognition is thought that typially reifores a perso’s feeligs
o Behaviour is tendency to approach or avoid an object
• Attitudes can be measured with self-report Likert scales
o It’s a uerial sale used to assess attitudes; iludes a set of possible answers
with labelled anchors on each extreme
o Their strength or importance can be assessed with response latencies that
capture attitude accessibility (how readily the attitude can become active in an
idividual’s id)
▪ Defined as the amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as
an attitude question
o Attitude linkage measures gauge attitude centrality (how closely an attitude is
correlated to attitudes about other issues)
o Implicit attitude measures tap into attitudes people are unaware they have or
may be unwilling to report
▪ Defined as an indirect measure of attitudes that does not involve a self-
report
Predicting Behavior from Attitudes
• It can be hard to predict behavior from attitudes, because attitudes are sometimes
ambiguous or inconsistent; they can conflict with other powerful determinants of
behavior; attitudes and their targets may be at different levels of generality; and some
behavior is automatic, bypassing conscious attitudes
Predicting Attitudes from Behavior
• Behavior can have substantial effects on attitudes
o Cognitive consistency theories emphasize how much people value consistency
among their various attitudes and between their attitudes and behavior
• Cognitive dissonance theory is based on the idea that people experience dissonance, or
discomfort, when attitudes and behavior are inconsistent
o Defied as the theory that iosisteies aog a perso’s thoughts,
sentiments, and actions cause an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that
leads to efforts to restore consistency
o To reduce the dissonance, people try bringing their attitudes in line with their
behavior
• After making a choice between two objects or courses of action, people engage in
dissonance reduction by finding new attractions in the chosen alternative and previously
undetected flaws in the unchosen alternative
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