SOCPSY 1Z03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Little Albert Experiment, Cognitive Dissonance, Leon Festinger

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Social Psychology
• Course: SOCPSY 1Z03
• Professor: Paul Galvin

Document Summary

Attitudes affect our behaviour and are of interest to many groups of people. They are emotional responses that shape behaviour. An attitude is a predisposition to respond to a particular object or person in a favorable or unfavorable way . Formation: reinforcement/instrumental conditioning- reward and punishment (direct experience, classical conditioning (no direct experience, just association, observational learning (e. g. media) Learning a new behaviour (or attitude) via the process of association. Two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response. 11 month old infant tested with stimuli to see response. Initially, neutral unemotional reaction & he wasn"t scarred. Sound of hammer did produce negative reaction & he was scared. Rat was repeatedly paired with hammer sound. Albert developed rat phobia even in absence of sound (association) Stage 1: unconditioned stimulus (ucs) produces an unconditioned response (ucr) E. g. loud noise (ucs) produces startled reaction (ucr)