Attitudes and Behavior

The many definitions of attitude that have been offered through the year have referred to both physical and mental states. As a working definition, we can consider attitudes to be responses that locate objects of thought on some particular dimension of judgment. The attitudes of a large group of people are referred to collectively as public opinion.

Most attitudes have three components: a cognitive or belief aspect, an affective or feeling aspect, and a behavioral or conative component. Different questions and measures may emphasize different aspect of an attitude. Two major measurement technique are the Likert method and the semantic differential techniques. Among the numerous other measures that have been developed, some are rather indirect indexes of attitudes.

Attitudes are formed in a variety of ways. Direct experience with the attitude object itself is a common means of developing an attitude, and learning theory principles can help to explain the acquisition process. Attitudes are also influenced by the opinions and behaviors of parents and peer and by the communication media. The media's influenced can be explained by social learning theory.

Attitude structure refers to the makeup of attitudes. Attitudes vary, for example, in their complexity. Value pluralism suggests that attitudinal complexity is a result of the amount of conflict between competing values that are relevant to a particular issue. Attitudes are related not only to basic values but to other attitudes as well. They also affect the ways in which other information is selected and retained in memory, so that it often supports existent attitudes.

A major issue is the relationship between assessed attitudes and observed behaviors. Some early investigators found little relationship between the two, but more recent work has substantially advanced our understanding of when and how such relationships will be found. The theory of reasoned action bases predictions of behavioral intentions, and in turn behavior, on two factors: one's attitude toward the behavior and subjective norms in regard to that behavior.

An understanding of the relationships between attitude and behavior entails in understanding of the processes involved. Advances in social cognition have helped to develop such understanding. The accessibility of an attitude is a major determinant of its ability to predict behavior, and conditions that make attitudes accessible are being specified.

Source:
Deaux, Kay. 1984. Social Psychology. Cole Publishing Company

Communication

Communication is fundamental to most social behavior. Although the forms of communication are varied, it has been truthfully said that we can't not communicate. Early models of the communication process described a one way flow from a transmitter to receiver. More recent models stress that communication is a shared social system, with both partners bringing a set of expectations and understanding to the interaction. Both verbal and non verbal communications are part of this shared system.

We communicate through may channels, including language and para language, gaze, facial expression, body movements, and gestures, touch, and interpersonal distance. The study of our use of language, the most obvious form of communication, reveals how important intention and interpretation can be. The nonverbal behaviors, including gaze, serve a variety of purposes. Five specific functions are (1) to provide information, (2) to regulate interaction, (3) to express intimacy, (4) to exercise social control, and (5) to facilitate the accomplishment of tasks.

Facial expression convey a variety of emotions, and these basic emotional expressions can be identified by people in very different cultures. Cultures may differ, however, in the display rules that govern the circumstances in which an emotion will be expressed. Interpersonal distance is a more abstract form of communication, but it, too, is important means of conveying information. Four major zones (intimate, personal, social, and public) define the distance between people which accompany different type of interchange.

All of these verbal and nonverbal channels combine in the process of communication to convey meaning. Three major dimensions of communication have been identified (liking, status, and responsiveness), each of which is associated with a distinctive set of nonverbal cues. Two models have been proposed to explain how nonverbal cues are combined to convey liking. The equilibrium model proposes that participants in an interaction seek to archive a balance between pressures toward approach and avoidance, and compensate for an excess of pressure in one direction by sending nonverbal messages designed to restore balance. The arousal model suggests that the way a change in arousal level is interpreted depends on the way the situation is defined. Sometimes compensation will be the rule, and at other times reciprocity is more likely.

Conversations have a regular structure, and the elements of that structure—an opening, a body, and a close—are typically regulated by a set of rules of conventions. Conversations between partners in a close relationship tend to follow somewhat distinctive rules. Self-disclosure, for example, is both more common in such conversation and less subject to rules of strict reciprocity.

Deceptive communication is accompanied by specific patterns of verbal and non verbal behaviors. Although deceit may be leaked, however, observers are often unable distinguish the truth teller from the liar.

Self and social knowledge combine the communication process. Often a person's beliefs about another can influence that other person behavior, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Five step comprise the expectancy confirmation sequence in which belief of the perceiver are conveyed to a target, who interprets the message an then acts in accordance with that interpretation. The target's response may thus tend to confirm the perceiver's beliefs. In other circumstances the target will dis confirm expectations in order to communicate some other message back to the perceiver.

Source:
Deaux, Kay. 1984. Social Psychology. Cole Publishing Company

Social Knowledge

Understanding other people is a useful skill that makes the world more predictable. Our initial impressions of other people are often based on surface characteristics, such as physical appearance, which are immediately visible. We infer a person's character traits and personality from the characteristics we see.

Some traits, which have appropriately been called central traits, are more important than others in the process of impression formation. Traits also vary in the degree to which they can be confirmed or dis confirmed by observation. In combining a series of trait descriptors, people tend to average their values to arrive at an overall judgment. Accuracy of impression is an elusive issue, as eyewitness testimony in the courtroom has demonstrated.

The mental categories that represent social knowledge may be conceptualized in several ways. Most people have a set of implicit personality theories and social theories that represent their understanding of human behavior. More specific events are represented by schemes, prototypes, and scripts. A stereotype is a schema that summarizes beliefs about members of a particular group. In some instances, particularly in the case of a negative beliefs about member of a particularly in the case of a negative belief, a stereotype may reflect an illusory correlation between two actually unrelated factors.

The process of social cognition include the initial encoding of information and the subsequent retrieval of information from memory. Both the vividness and the distinctiveness of an event will affect its encoding. Moods, goals, and emotional states are also influential. Priming can affect the accessibility of a particular social category.

Because social information is so extensive, people have developed a set of heuristics or shortcuts to make their task simpler. The social inference process is also subject to a number of biases, including the false consensus bias.

The specific form of social interference that concern explanations for the outcomes of events is called causal attribution. In general, action ma be attributed to either a dispositional factor or situational factor. Several models are have been developed to explain various aspects of the attribution process. Biases are evident in out attribution as well. We tend, for example, to overestimate the influence of dispositional factors (the fundamental attribution error). At a more general level, explanations of events often reflect a belief in a just world.

Source:
Deaux, Kay. 1984. Social Psychology. Cole Publishing Company

The Self

Social knowledge and social behavior begin with the self-concept, the totality of an individual's through about the self. As such early social scientists as George Herbert mead and Harry Stack Sullivan pointed out. We learn about ourselves from the reflected appraisals of others. We also about ourselves through the outcomes of action we take.

Self-schemes are cognitive generalization about the self that influence the way we organize and remember events and experiences. The self-concept consists of multiple schema's. We may usefully think of the self as consisting on multiple identities arranged in a hierarchy of importance. The self-concept also includes ideas about what we would like to be or think it possible to become. Certain of a person's characteristics are likely to affect the definition of self. Both gender identity and racial identity are important aspects of the self.

Self-perception theory says that we become aware of ourselves by watching what we do much as outside observers form judgments of us on the basis of what they see. Certain conditions can create a state of objective self-awareness; at such times we focus attention on some aspect of the self. The particular aspect of self that is salient depends in part on the accessibility of that aspect, which can be affected by priming. People who are high in self-consciousness are more likely to engage in this process that people who are low in self-consciousness.

Because the concept of self is an active one, it is important to consider the processes involved. Self-esteem refers to the evaluation of oneself, an assessment of how good or bad one is. Negative emotions are generally aroused when there is a discrepancy between the perceived self and some standard of comparison (an ideal self, an ought self, or a possible self).

To evaluate their abilities, people often engage in social comparison, looking to other people as a way of gauging their own performance. People also make causal attributions to explain their outcomes. Frequently such attributions are self-serving, designed to permit us to take credit for positive outcomes and to avoid blame for negative ones. Attributions are important because they can affect subsequent choices and actions.

The attempt to control the images of the self that are presented to others is called impression management. Such self-presentation can serve many goals and people can user a variety of strategies in pursuing them. People who anticipate failure, for instance, may resort to self-handicapping strategies. Although all people who score high in self-monitoring are more attuned to this process than people who score low in it.

Source:
Deaux, Kay. 1984. Social Psychology. Cole Publishing Company

The Self