Attitudes, Social Cognition and Social Influence
Social psychology questions test attitude components and change, attribution biases, and the classic conformity and obedience findings.
Attitudes
An attitude has cognitive, affective and behavioural components. Attitudes form through learning, direct experience and reference groups. Persuasion depends on source credibility, message framing and audience characteristics. Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory says inconsistent cognitions create discomfort, motivating attitude change.
Social cognition
Attribution is internal (dispositional) or external (situational). The fundamental attribution error overestimates disposition and underestimates situation for others; the actor-observer bias explains our own behaviour situationally; the self-serving bias credits successes to ourselves. Prejudice is a negative attitude; discrimination is the behaviour; stereotypes are generalised beliefs.
Social influence
Conformity is matching group norms (Asch). Obedience is following an authority command (Milgram). Compliance techniques include foot-in-the-door and door-in-the-face. Group processes include social facilitation, social loafing, deindividuation, group polarisation, groupthink and the bystander effect.
Worked example
In Asch's line-judgment task a participant gives an obviously wrong answer because all others do. Reasoning: this is conformity, involving normative influence (fear of standing out) and informational influence (assuming others are right), not obedience, because no authority commanded it.
Traps
- Conformity is peer pressure; obedience is authority pressure.
- Prejudice is an attitude; discrimination is action.
- The fundamental attribution error overestimates the person and underestimates the situation.