Ch. 12 Topics

1. The conditions that make attitudes predictive of behavior.
        The more specific the attitude toward something, the more predictive it is, such as liking a specific NFL team as opposed to football in general. Attitudes formed through direct experience also tend to predict behavior better. This condition explains why parenting a second child might be influenced, and therefore more predictable, by the first.
2. The difference between implicit and explicit attitudes.
         Explicit attitudes are those you know about and can report to other people, such as stating things you like. Implicit attitudes are those that influence our feelings and behaviors at an unconscious level, such as confidence at something you have practiced.
3. The concept of cognitive dissonance.
         Cognitive dissonance is when there is a contradiction between either two attitudes or an attitude and a behavior. When someone knows something is wrong but still does it, is an example of this concept. People will often feel anxiety and tension from this contradiction and will usually try to rationalize or trivialize the discrepancy.
4. Personal attributions and their implications.
         Personal attributions, also known as internal or dispositional attributions, are explanations that refer to things within people. It refers to internal characteristics such as traits, abilities, moods, efforts, etc. to explain an event or behavior.
5. Jigsaw classroom.
         With the jigsaw classroom, interaction between not only individuals, but also groups occur. When a group is assigned a collective project upon a general topic, areas of this topic will be assigned to a specific person of a group like a job. The experts of the same job in all groups will then get together and collaborate and then return to their groups to relay the information. Thus the cooperation is twofold and the material is better learned.