SOCPSY 1Z03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Participant Observation, Cognitive Dissonance, Leon Festinger
10 Mar 2016
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An attitude is a predisposition to respond to a particular object in a favourable or unfavourable way. Formation: reinforcement (instrumental conditioning, classical conditioning, observational learning. Learning a new behaviour (or attitude) via the process of association: two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response. Little albert example (watson and rayner, 1920: 11 month old infant tested on response to stimuli. White rat, rabbit, mask: initially, neutral unemotional reaction, but: sound of hammer did produce negative reaction, after rat was repeatedly paired with hammer sound, albert developed rat phobia even in absence of sound. Stage 1: unconditional stimulus (ucs) produces an unconditioned response (ucr: e. g. Loud noise (ucs) may produce startles reaction (ucr) Stage 2: conditioning: a stimulus which produces no response (i. e. neutral) is associated with the unconditioned stimulus at which point it now becomes known as the conditioned stimulus (cs, e. g. Presence of rat (stimulus) becomes associated with the unconditioned stimulus (loud noise)
