Psychology 2720A/B Lecture Notes - Mahzarin Banaji, Anthony Greenwald, Implicit-Association Test

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2720A/B
• Professor: Patrick Brown

Document Summary

The concept of attitudes is probably the most important one in all of social psychology. Attitudes have been the focus of thousands of experiments over the past 75 years, and there are dozens of theories that address attitude formation and/or attitude change (attitude change is the focus of chapter. Because almost everything we do reflects, at least to some extent, our attitudes. We have attitudes toward virtually all objects and people in our environment (some of our attitudes are relatively weak, of course). When we have a favourable attitude toward a target, we tend to approach it or treat it positively, whereas when we have an unfavourable attitude toward a target, we tend to avoid it or treat it negatively. Attitudes are a fundamental determinant of our everyday actions. Chapter 6 discusses how and why attitudes form, how they can be measured, how they influence information processing, and how they guide behaviour.