PSY220H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Ambivalence, Carnival Games, Implicit-Association Test
Document Summary
Attitude: a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone, exhibited in one"s beliefs, feelings or intended behavior. Our assumption: our private beliefs and feelings determine our public behavior, so if we wish to change behavior we must first change hearts and minds. In beginning social psychologists agreed: to know peoples attitudes is to predict their actions. Leon festinger concluded that the evidence showed that changing people"s attitudes hardly affects their behavior. For much of the last century researchers have wondered how much of our attitudes affect our actions, remember these three dimensions as the abcs of attitudes. The abcs of attitudes: affect: (feelings, behavior: (tendency, cognition: (thoughts) Allan wicker offered a shocking conclusion: people"s expressed attitudes hardly predict their varying behaviors. The disjuncture btw attitudes and actions is what daniel batson called. Warnings about dangers of smoking only minimally affect those who already smoke.
