Ch. 12 Paragraphs

1. What are attitudes and where do they come from? Discuss the following sources of attitudes:

• Familiarity and the mere exposure effect.
• Classical conditioning
• Operant Conditioning
• Socialization

      Attitudes are our evaluations of objects, events, or ideas. They are shaped by social context and play an important role in interaction and evaluation. In cases where we are more familiar to an item, they will generally have more positive attitudes toward it, because of the mere exposure effect. Attitudes can be conditioned classically by using positive stimuli to associate a neutral object with a positive attitude. By rewarding certain events or actions can create a positive attitude towards them through operant conditioning. Socialization also affects our attitudes by common practice and the bandwagon effect. So teachers, doctors, media, etc. affects our attitudes toward things.
2. How can attitudes be changed? Consider discrepancies between attitudes and behavior, as well as persuasion.
        Research gathered in dissonance studies have shown that one way to get people to change their attitudes is to change their behavior. By justifying effort, it is shown that it is harder to absolve oneself from something that initially caused great dissonance therefore inflating importance and influencing attitude. In persuasion, a message is transmitted in order to change attitude. Further studies of persuasion have also found that more memorable and simplistic messages are often the most persuasive.
3. What are attributions, in general? How do attributions affect our impressions of others and of ourselves? Are our attributions accurate?
        Attributions are people's explanations for events or actions. People make attributions to satisfy our basic need for order and predictability. The just world hypothesis is when we make attributions about a victim of a senseless crime. There are two main types of attributions, personal and situational. Personal attributions are explanations that refer to things within people, such as ability, mood, etc. Situational attributions are external factors, such as weather, accidents, other people, etc. Our explanations of other peoples' behavior overemphasizes their personality traits and underestimates the importance of the situation; this is called the fundamental attribution error. Because of the correspondence bias, people expect others' behaviors to correspond with their own beliefs and personalities.
4. What are stereotypes? How may they be self-fulfilling? How do they affect our behavior?
         Stereotypes are cognitive schemas that help us organize information about people on the basis of their membership in certain groups. Initially untrue stereotypes can become true through self-fulfilling prophecy, in which people come to behave in ways that confirm their own or others' expectations. Negative stereotypes can lead to prejudice and discrimination, whereas positive stereotypes may lead to pleasantness.
5. How can stereotypes and the associated prejudices be changed? what evidence do we have for effectiveness of various methods?
           When people are prejudice, they have negative judgments about people based on their stereotypes. Shared subordinate goals reduce hostility between groups, because they require cooperation. Muzafer Sherif did a study where he took two groups of all white, 5th-grade boys to a camp. After the two groups had spent time getting to know the members within their respective groups, they then competed against each other in high-stakes athletics. This caused prejudice and mistreatment between the groups. However, after the two groups were given subordinate goals, they became friends.