Quiz 4 Flashcards
(14 cards)
What is a Likert scale?
A numerical scale used to assess people’s attitudes; includes a set of possible answers with labeled anchors on each extreme.
What do Wilson and his colleagues say about introspection and its effects on the relationship between attitudes and behavior?
When we introspect our reasons for attitudes toward others, we may focus on what is easy to identify, justify, and capture in words. We miss real reasons for our attraction.
Learn about cognitive dissonance: what it is, different forms it can take, and different ways that people reduce it.
Inconsistencies among our thoughts, sentiments, and actions create a repelling emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency.
Once you develop a preference for one over another, you distort the information to support your initial preference.
Bolstering our identity and self-esteem by taking note of important elements of our identity, such as our important values.
Self-affirmation theory
How is self-perception (as an alternative to dissonance) a reason for changing attitudes?
Behavior that is inconsistent with prior attitudes does indeed generate arousal, and the effort to dispel that arousal motivates attitudes found in dissonance experiments.
What are cognitive consistency theories?
The idea that people find psychological inconsistency uncomfortable and therefore engage in psychological work to lessen the discomfort.
What is the relationship between arm movement and attitudes, as shown in Cacioppo’s research?
Behavior can be on purpose, in alignment with an attitude, or an automatic response. Automatic behavior that bypasses our conscious attitudes can conflict with those attitudes without our knowing it.
What are system-justifying beliefs? What is system justification theory, and how does it work?
The theory that people are motivated to see the existing political and social status quo as desirable, fair, and legitimate.
The world is or should be fair.
Wealthy and powerful benefit from this ideal.
What is agenda control?
Efforts of the media to select certain events and topics to emphasize, thereby shaping which issues and events people think are important.
We all tend to believe that the media are biased against our preferred causes.
Hostile media phenomenon
What was the result of Ziva Kunda’s research on how people respond to messages linking caffeine consumption to disease?
Only the high-caffeine-using females were not convince this was true. Because it did not apply to them, it was easy to convince men and low caffeine using females about something they had no comparison to.
What is attitude inoculation?
Small attacks on people’s beliefs that engage their attitudes, prior commitments, and knowledge structures, enabling them to counteract a subsequent larger attack and be resistant to persuasion.
How can prior knowledge about an attitude object affect resistance to persuasion?
We can more easily accept or reject a persuasion based on our experience with the persuasive attitude.
What is an attitude?
A positive, negative, or mixed feeling about a person or object.
