SOCY 273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Social Distance, Contact Hypothesis, Institutional Racism

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 273
• Professor: Lisa Carver

Document Summary

Attitudes are the positive or negative evaluations of an object, person, group, or an idea. Sociologists examine how our position in society affects our attitude formation. The social psychological study of attitudes seeks to explain how social forces affect individuals" attitudes and how these attitudes in turn relate to behaviour. Prejudicial attitudes and behaviour one major application of symbolic interaction to the study of attitudes and behaviours is the understanding of prejudice. Du bois made observations of the poor relationships between black and white people: his observations led many scholars to study the causes of the prejudicial attitudes and behaviours. One way that we try to assess the relationship of attitudes with behaviours is through statistical correlation. A correlation of 0 means that attitudes and behaviours are completely unrelated. The relationship between attitudes and behaviours is typically small about 0. 38 being moderate.