Attitude and Social Cognition

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Psychology Class XII (Psychology), Chapter 6.

Why do you like some things before you can say why?

Think of a brand, a subject or a food you have strong feelings about. You probably did not weigh evidence before deciding. Yet the feeling shapes what you buy, what you study and whom you talk to. These stable ways of thinking, feeling and acting toward people, things and ideas are called attitudes, and they are the main subject of this chapter. This is also where social psychology gets practical: advertisers, teachers, campaigners and community leaders all want to change attitudes, and the chapter explains when that works.

Social psychology is the branch of psychology that investigates how the behaviour of individuals is affected by others and the social environment. It deals with behaviour in the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. To explain social behaviour completely, we must study both social cognitive processes (how we think about the social world) and social behaviour, and we must go beyond common sense and folk wisdom.

What an attitude is, and what it is not

Ask yourself how many times today you said, "In my opinion…". Some opinions barely matter to you. Others make you emotional if challenged. When your view is not only a thought, but also has an emotional and an action side, it is more than an opinion. It is an attitude.

An attitude is a state of mind, a set of views or thoughts about a topic (the attitude object), with an evaluative feature (positive, negative or neutral), an emotional component and a tendency to act in a certain way. Attitudes are not behaviour itself. They are a tendency to behave, they are part of cognition and they cannot be observed from outside.

Together these are the A, B, C components. We usually expect the three to point the same way, but they need not. Your cognitive component may be strong while the affective and behavioural parts are weak, so predicting one from the other two can give a wrong picture.

Attitudes versus close cousins. Attitudes must be told apart from opinions, beliefs and values.

Why have attitudes at all? They provide a background that makes it easier to decide how to act in new situations. Your attitude toward foreigners, for example, acts as a mental layout or blueprint for how to behave when you meet one.

Four properties of an attitude

Member attitudes inside a system are not the same as the three components. Each member attitude has its own A, B, C components.

How attitudes are formed

Attitudes are mostly learned, through one's own experiences and through interaction with others. A few studies suggest an inborn element, but genes influence attitudes only indirectly, along with learning.

Factors that provide the context. Four factors shape attitude formation.

How attitudes change

Attitudes still forming, which are more like opinions, change more easily than those that have become firmly established and part of one's values. Leaders, politicians, advertisers and producers of consumer goods all want to know how change happens. The chapter describes three ideas.

1. Balance (Fritz Heider). The P-O-X triangle has three corners: P is the person whose attitude is studied, O is another person and X is the attitude object. There are three attitudes: P-O, O-X and P-X, each positive or negative. If the triangle is imbalanced, the attitude changes in the direction of balance, because imbalance is logically uncomfortable.

A quick check: multiply the three signs. If the product is positive, the triangle is balanced. If it is negative, it is imbalanced.

Worked example: dowry. P has a positive attitude to dowry (P-X positive). P wants his son to marry the daughter of O, who has a negative attitude to dowry (O-X negative). O has a positive attitude to P (P-O positive). The signs are two positives and one negative, so the triangle is imbalanced and something must change. Three changes would restore balance.

Pause and predict: you like your friend (O) and you dislike a particular reality show (X), but your friend loves the show. What is the state of your triangle, and what could change?

Check your answer: P-O is positive, P-X is negative and O-X is positive. That is two positives and one negative, so it is imbalanced. To restore balance you might start to like the show (P-X turns positive), your friend might come to dislike the show (O-X turns negative), or you might cool toward your friend (P-O turns negative).

2. Cognitive dissonance (Leon Festinger). This idea focuses on the cognitive component. Cognitions in an attitude must be consonant, that is, logically in line with each other. If two are dissonant, one will change toward consonance. Example: "Pan masala causes mouth cancer which is fatal" and "I eat pan masala." These feel out of tune, so one idea must change. The healthy, sensible way to remove the dissonance is to stop eating pan masala.

Festinger and Carlsmith's experiment shows dissonance at work. Students did a very boring task, then were asked to tell a waiting group that it was very interesting. Half were paid one dollar and half twenty dollars for the lie. Weeks later, the one dollar group rated the task as more interesting than the twenty dollar group did.

Why it works this way: the one dollar group had no good outside reason for lying, so the easiest way to reduce the discomfort was to change their view of the task. The twenty dollar group already had a reason.

Balance and dissonance are both examples of cognitive consistency: elements of an attitude must be in the same direction, or the person feels mental discomfort and something changes.

3. The two step concept (S. M. Mohsin, an Indian psychologist). Attitude change happens in two steps.

Example: Preeti reads that a soft drink is very harmful, but her favourite sportsperson advertises it. For the sportsperson to change Preeti's attitude, Preeti must identify with the sportsperson and the sportsperson must show positive feelings for fans like her (Step I). The sportsperson must then actually change their own habit, for instance by substituting a health drink. Seeing that changed behaviour, Preeti imitates it and stops drinking the soft drink (Step II).

Two views. For the exam: Festinger's dissonance explains why the one dollar group changed their attitude. A change in behaviour (telling a lie) led to a change in attitude. Another reading: Daryl Bem's self perception theory offers a different explanation for similar findings: people infer their attitudes by observing their own behaviour, much as they would infer another person's attitude. The textbook's own remark that "sometimes it is behaviour that decides the attitude" fits both accounts. For the paper, give Festinger's dissonance.

What makes persuasion work

Pause and predict: a health campaign wants to persuade parents to use oral rehydration salts (ORS) for children with diarrhoea. Which mode of transmission is likely to work best, and which source?

Check your answer: face to face messages from community social workers and doctors, who are credible sources. They are usually more effective than describing the benefits only on the radio.

Do attitudes predict behaviour?

We expect behaviour to follow from attitudes, but it does not always. There is more consistency between attitude and behaviour when:

The LaPiere study. Richard LaPiere, an American social psychologist, asked a Chinese couple to travel across the United States and stay in many hotels. Only once were they refused service. Later he sent a questionnaire to the managers of hotels and tourist homes in the same areas, asking if they would accommodate Chinese guests. A very large percentage said they would not. The expressed negative attitude was inconsistent with the positive behaviour actually shown.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: LaPiere's study shows that attitudes do not always predict behaviour. In reality: the study has been criticised. The staff who served the couple were not necessarily the people who later answered the questionnaire, and saying what you would do in a letter is different from facing two polite guests at the door. Researchers see it as a warning that attitudes and behaviour can differ, not as a final law. Why it matters: it explains why the textbook lists conditions under which the two do match.

Prejudice and discrimination

Three words are often confused, and each matches one of the A, B, C components.

Prejudice can exist without discrimination, and discrimination can be shown without prejudice, but the two often go together and then lead to conflict between groups. Discrimination can be curbed by law, but the cognitive and emotional parts of prejudice are harder to change. Discrimination has been seen on the basis of race, class, caste, gender, religion, community, physical handicap and illnesses such as AIDS.

Sources of prejudice. Prejudice has one or more of these sources.

Strategies to handle prejudice. Knowing the sources is the first step. Strategies aim at minimising opportunities for learning prejudices, changing the attitudes, de emphasising narrow ingroup identity and discouraging self fulfilling prophecy among victims.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: contact between groups reduces prejudice only under the three conditions listed. In reality: this matches what is known as the contact hypothesis, proposed by the psychologist Gordon Allport, who argued that contact helps when groups have equal status and shared goals and work cooperatively. Why it matters: it explains why simply putting groups in the same room, in competition, can make things worse.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Therapeutic Approaches shows how irrational beliefs and cognitions are changed in therapy, a clinical cousin of attitude change.
• Next: Social Influence and Group Processes takes up ingroup and outgroup, social identity and intergroup conflict, which this chapter's prejudice section points to.
• Related: Learning explains association, reinforcement and observational learning, the processes behind attitude formation. Self and Personality covers self esteem, which affects how easily a person's attitudes change.