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Social Psych Module 2 - Lesson 5

1. Attitudes are studied through self-report measures and covert techniques like physiological responses. Attitudes better predict behaviors that are specific or important to a person. 2. There are two routes to persuasion - the central route focuses on message content while the peripheral route emphasizes heuristics. The source, content, and audience affect a message's persuasiveness. 3. Cognitive dissonance theory holds that people experience tension from actions conflicting with attitudes, so they change attitudes to match behaviors. Recent work finds attitude change occurs when people take responsibility for actions. People also rationalize behaviors to manage impressions, maintain self-views, or see themselves consistently.

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102 views

Social Psych Module 2 - Lesson 5

1. Attitudes are studied through self-report measures and covert techniques like physiological responses. Attitudes better predict behaviors that are specific or important to a person. 2. There are two routes to persuasion - the central route focuses on message content while the peripheral route emphasizes heuristics. The source, content, and audience affect a message's persuasiveness. 3. Cognitive dissonance theory holds that people experience tension from actions conflicting with attitudes, so they change attitudes to match behaviors. Recent work finds attitude change occurs when people take responsibility for actions. People also rationalize behaviors to manage impressions, maintain self-views, or see themselves consistently.

Uploaded by

Daphne
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Module II

MODULE II
LESSON 5: Attitudes and Attitude Change

Things you should accomplish!

1. Describe how attitudes are defined and how they


are measured. Address both self-report and covert
techniques.
2. Discuss how attitudes are related to behaviors.
Explain what types of attitudes are most likely to
predict behavior, and under what circumstances.
3. Define the peripheral and central routes to
persuasion, and explain their differences.
Describe how persuasion differs in the two routes.
Explain how self-esteem and intelligence are
related to persuasion. Identify factors that
influence which route of processing is chosen.
4. Explain how the sources of a persuasive message
affects whether people are likely to be persuaded
by the message. Describe the circumstances
under which the source of the message is less
important than what it said, including the reasons
behind the sleeper effect.
5. Explain how the content of a message can affect
whether people are persuaded by it. Compare
primacy and recency effects. Describe how both
the cognitive and emotional contents of a message
affect its persuasiveness.
6. Explain how characteristics of the audience can
moderate the extent to which it is persuaded by a
message. Describe how forewarning and
inoculating the audience may affect levels of
persuasion.
7. Describe how role-playing can influence one’s
attitudes.
8. Explain the elements of the classic version of
cognitive dissonance theory. Discuss how this
theory can account for insufficient justification,
insufficient deterrence, effort justification, and the
justification of difficult decisions.

Module II
Things you should accomplish!

9. Explain the “new look” of cognitive dissonance and


address how it expands upon Festinger’s original
theory.
10. Describe three alternate routes to self-
persuasion. Explain how each routes describes
the ways in which people justify their behaviors.

3 BASIC ISSUES OR PRINCIPLES OF ATTITUDES AND ATTITUDE CHANGE

Module II
1. The study of attitudes has been one of the foundations of
social psychology. Researchers measure attitudes of asking
people direct questions about their attitudes or by assessing
people’s behavior or physiological responses. In general, our
attitudes are not as strong a predictor of our behaviors as one
might think. However, attitudes do a better job of predicting
behavior when the attitude is specific to a behavior or
particularly important.
2. One of the earliest fields of study in social psychology focused
on persuasion, the changing of people’s attitudes through
communication. Research in this field has found that there
are two basic routes to persuasion: a central route that
emphasizes the content of a message and systematic
deliberate processing of information, and a peripheral route
that emphasizes more rules of thumb of heuristic processing
of information. The source of a message, its content, and the
audience that hears the message all affect whether the
message will be persuasive.
3. People are also persuaded by their own actions and the roles
that they play. Cognitive dissonance theory maintains that
when people engage in an action that conflicts with their
attitudes they will feel tension, and that the easiest way to
reduce this tension is to change their attitude. In this way the
theory predicts that people will change their attitudes to
match their behavior. Recent revisions to cognitive dissonance
theory suggest that this attitude change occurs mostly when
people take responsibility for their actions. Other approaches
emphasize that people rationalize their behaviors by changing
them to manage a positive impression with others, to maintain
a positive view of themselves, or to be consistent with the way
in which they perceive their own behavior.

Module II
KEY TERM EXERCISE: CONCEPTS YOU SHOULD KNOW
To help you better understand these concepts, rather
than just memorize them, write a definition for each term
in your own words.

Key Terms
1. theory of planned behavior
2. cognitive dissonance theory
3. persuasion
4. inoculation hypothesis
5. central route to persuasion
6. insufficient deterrence
7. peripheral route to persuasion
8. attitude
9. elaboration
10. sleeper effect
11. need for cognition
12. insufficient justification
13. psychological reactance
14. attitude scale
15. implicit attitudes
16. facial electromyography (EMG)
17. bogus pipeline

Module II

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