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# 1. Introduction & Research Methods
> PSYG 2504 Social Psychology
What is social psychology:
The **scientific** study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.
## Social Psychology focuses on the behavior of individuals
Four core values to be scientific:
- Accuracy – in a careful, precise and error-free manner
- Objectivity – free from bias
- Skepticism – accept findings as accurate after verifying repeatedly
- Open-mindedness – to change the viewpoints when evidence shows the inaccuracy of the viewpoints
## Social Psychology seeks to understand the causes of social behavior and thought
We are not isolated from social and cultural influences.
To understand the factors that shape the actions and thoughts of individuals in the social contexts.
E.g. love, violence, helping…
## Social Psychology seeks to understand the causes of social behavior and thought
### The actions and characteristics of other people
**Our emotions, thoughts and behavior are affected by others.**
When others are watching us (e.g. an attractive person looked at you at the canteen/ your lecturer stood next to you when you were having the examination)
Others’ physical characteristics (e.g. tall/short; fat/slim; young/old; attractive/less attractive…)
### Cognitive processes
**Engage in social cognition – to think about other persons.**
*Infer* other people and then *affect* how we behave to them (i.e. your reactions in a situation will depend upon your memories of someone’s past behavior and your inferences about whether his/her explanation is really true)
e.g. You are going to have lunch with your friend and she is late for an hour, how will you react when she says…
She has totally forgotten? She had diarrhoea?
### Environmental variables
**The physical environment influences our feelings, thoughts and behaviors.**
E.g. Do people become more aggressive and irritable when the weather is hot? Does exposure to a pleasant smell in the air make people happier?
### Biological factors
**Comes from the Evolutionary Psychology – we now possess a large number of evolved psychological mechanisms that help us to deal with important problems relating to survival.**
E.g. attractiveness (women rate sense of humor very high on the list of desirable characteristics in potential romantic partners)
= Signal high intelligence, more attractive, interest in forming new relationships
## Social Psychology aims to search for basic principles under the ever-changing social world
- Develop basic principles that are accurate regardless of when and where they applied or tested.
- Social psychologists also recognize that cultures differ greatly and the social work keeps on changing (e.g. independence or interdependence)
- E.g. Would the determinants of attraction change after the advancement of technology, e.g. online dating? Social media?
### Research as a route to increase knowledge
#### Systematic observation
Mainly by *naturalistic observation*.
The researcher just simply record what is happening in each context.
He/she would make no attempt to change the behavior of the people being observed
#### Survey Method
- Advantages:
- Easy to gather information
- Can quickly get the opinions
- Large sample size
- Disadvantages:
- Social desirability
#### Correlation
- Search for *relationships* between two events
- Make *predictions*
- Represents in a *number*, from $-1$ to $+1$
- Positive correlation: when one variable increases, the other also increases
- Negative correlation: when one variable increases, the other decreases
- NOT implying causation
#### Experimental Method
One or more factors (IVs) are systematically changed to determine whether the changes will affect one or more factors (DVs)
- Independent variables (IVs): the factor/variable that is changed/manipulated in an experiment
- Dependent variables (DVs): the factor/variable that is measured in an experiment
Researchers vary the independent variable (e.g., the number of bystanders people think are present) and observe what effect that has on the dependent variable (e.g., whether people help).
- Random assignment – the participant must have an equal chance to be exposed to each level of the IVs
- Internal validity – Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable
- External validity – The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people
### Research vs. human rights
#### Informed consent
**The research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate**
Informed consent should include:
1. A brief description of the purpose and procedure of the research, including the expected duration of the study
2. A statement of any risks or discomfort associated with participation
3. A guarantee of anonymity and the confidentiality of records
The identification of the researcher and of where to receive information about subjects’ rights or questions about the study
4. A statement that participation is completely voluntary and can be terminated at any time without penalty
5. A statement of alternative procedures that may be used
6. A statement of any benefits or compensation provided to the subjects and the number of subjects involved
7. An offer to provide a summary of findings
#### Debriefing
1. Provide necessary information (e.g. yourselves, nature, hypotheses) about the experiment.
2. Clear any misunderstanding or misconceptions
Explain why deception was used (if any)
3. Minimize psychological harm or uncomfortable feelings aroused from the experiment
4. Make sure they leave with positive feelings
5. Appreciate and thank them for their contribution and help
Let them know where to get further information

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# Social perception
> PSYG 2504 Social Psychology
*The study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.*
## Nonverbal communication
- The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words, including via facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position, movement, touch and gaze.
- It provides abundant information about others
- Help us to express our emotions, attitudes, and personality
- Relatively irrepressible (difficult to control)
- **Basic channels of nonverbal communication:**
- **The visible channel** – facial expressions, eye contact, body movements, posture, and touching
- **Paralanguage** – voice pitch, loudness, rhythm, inflection, and hesitations to convey information
### Channels of nonverbal communication
#### Facial expression
**Changes in the face that can occur as an automatic response to an internal state or as a voluntary response to a social situations.**
- Reveal emotions
Six basic types: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and disgust (e.g., Ekman, 1982)
- Culturally universal?
Yes, both the use and recognition (Ekman & Friesen, 1975)
- Can we accurately recognize others’ facial expressions?
Depends on people’s intentional focus on showing their own emotions in their facial expressions
#### Eye contact
- Gaze: looking at another person’s eyes
- High level of gazing from another person = interest or friendliness (Kleinke, 1986);
- Avoid eye contact = unfriendly or shy
- Too high/intense gazing = stare
- A sign of anger or hostility (Ellsworth & Carlsmith, 1973), leads to the termination of social interaction
- Bushman (1998) advised drivers to avoid eye contact with aggressive motorists
Assault may result because they may perceive aggressiveness
#### Body language/ Gestures
- Our emotions are often reflected in the position, posture and movement of our bodies
- Large no. of movements (esp. touching, rubbing, scratching) = emotional arousal
E.g. ‘Fidgeting’ = lying
- Gestures have meaning mainly when observers and participants understand the context and the culture (e.g. emblems)
- Emblems: nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture, usually having direct verbal translations, e.g. OK sign
#### Touching
- The appropriateness of touching depends on the situation.
- Depends on who? Nature of the touching? The context?
- Suggest friendliness, affection, sexual interest, dominance, caring, or aggression.
- Handshake is acceptable in many cultures.
Firmer and longer handshakes = higher extraversion and openness to experience
#### Distance
Standing close is a sign of friendship or interest.
- We stand closer to friends than strangers (Aiello & Cooper, 1972)
- People who want to be friendly would choose smaller distances
- People who are sexually attracted to each other stand close (Allgeier & Byrne, 1973)
#### Paralanguage
- Contains many emotional meanings (Banse & Scherer, 1996)
- Tone (an attitude/feeling conveyed through sound)
- Pitch (highness or loudness of sound)
- Sounds that occurred during speech (e.g. laughing, crying) and facial expressions were more accurate guides to the emotions underlying people’s statements than the spoken words (Hawk, van Kleef, Fischer, & van der Schalk, 2009)
#### Look of love?
- People in love tend to look at and touch each other differently than those not in love (e.g. holding hands in public, standing very close) (Gonzaga, Kelmer, Keltner, & Smith, 2001)
- The stronger the love, the more frequently the nonverbal cues showed (e.g. smiles, head nods, leaning towards one another)
- In short, inner feelings of love were reflected in the overt nonverbal actions under both positive and negative conditions
### Theories
#### Facial feedback hypothesis
- Facial feedback hypothesis (Duclos, Laird, Schneider, Sexter, Stern, & Van Lighten, 1989).
Our emotions influence our nonverbal cues, the cues themselves influence our internal feelings as well!
- The facial expression triggers the emotions or feelings.
E.g. You are laughing because you are happy BUT You also feel happier when you are laughing!
#### Gender differences on nonverbal behavior?
Girls and women tend to be more expressive, more involved in their interpersonal interactions, and more open in the expression of emotion (DePaulo, 1992)
- Use more nonverbal behavior during interaction with others
- Better at communicating happiness; Men at communicating anger (Coats & Feldman, 1996)
- More accurate interpreting the nonverbal cues than men (Hall, 1978)
#### Deception
**Facial expressions are not very helpful in helping people to detect deception (Ekman & Friesen, 1974).**
How to detect? NONVERBAL LEAKAGE
1. **Microexpressions** – fleeting facial expressions that last only a few tenths of a second
2. **Interchannel discrepancies** – inconsistencies shown between the nonverbal cues
3. **Eye contact** – blinking, dilated pupils, low level of eye contact or unusually high
4. Exaggerated facial expressions – smile more/greater sorrow than is typical in a given situation
5. **Linguistic style** – the voice is higher, shorter answers, longer delays in responding, more speech errors
Deception leads to negative social relations
## Attribution
**A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior.**
E.g. Why has a father just yelled at his daughter?
- **Internal attribution:** the inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality (e.g. father is impatient)
- **External attribution:** the inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in, with the assumption that most people would respond the same way in that situation (e.g. his daughter has just stepped into the street without looking?)
### Theories of Attribution
#### Correspondent Inference Theory (Jones & Davis, 1965)
**Use others’ behavior as a basis for inferring their traits.**
- This theory is to describe how we use others’ behavior to infer their dispositions.
- We like to make a dispositional attributions for a person’s behavior when:
1. the behavior is freely-chosen (not being forced)
2. the behaviour is clearly intentional
3. the behavior is not a function of the situation or expected roles
e.g. If Peter is late to school:
Internal attribution: He is lazy; He is not responsible
External attribution: He is late because of traffic jam; He is late because of the physical discomfort
#### Kelly’s covariation theory (1973)
**The typical social situation has three components:**
1. A person who displays a particular behaviour
2. An object/stimulus towards which the behaviour is directed
3. The behaviour occurs at a particular time or occasion
**Three types of information are needed:**
1. **Consensus** – The extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does
e.g. When you see a snake, you will scream, and many people scream when seeing a snake, so the consensus is high
2. **Consistency** – The extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances
e.g. You scream whenever you see a snake.
Consistency is high because you scream whenever you see a snake
3. **Distinctiveness** – The extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli
e.g. You do not scream when you see a cockroaches
You scream only when you see a snake, so the distinctiveness is high
### Attribution : Sources of errors
#### Fundamental Attribution Error (Jones & Harris, 1967)
> also called The Correspondence Bias
We tend to underestimate the impact of situational factors and overestimate the impact of internal, dispositional factors when we are analyzing others’ behavior
E.g. James is late to school, and we think he is an irresponsible person even though we know there is a serious traffic jam in Shatin.
**The attribution bias is dependent on too many factors:**
- Culture - stronger in Western cultures (Miyamoto & Kitayama, 2018)
- Age – young people in the West explain behaviour in terms of specific factors within the situation, and only later begin to show a tendency to favour personality attributions
#### The Actor-Observer effect (Malle, 2006)
**A tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational causes but others’ behavior to dispositional causes.**
e.g. You believe you fail the quiz because the lecturer is too harsh whereas if Josephine fails the same quiz because she is stupid
We are well aware of the external/situational factors affecting us but less aware of its effects on others
#### The Self-Serving Bias (Miller & Ross, 1975)
**A tendency to attribute one’s successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one’s failures that blame external, situational factors.**
**Explanation:**
- Cognitive reason: we want people to think well of us
- Motivational reason: to protect our self-esteem
E.g. We attain a good grade on the quiz because we are smart; We fail the quiz because Josephine is harsh
### Applications of attribution theory
**Attribution and Depression:**
- A self-defeating pattern of attributions
- Such a pattern is opposite to the self-serving bias
i.e. They attribute the negative outcomes to internal causes but positive outcomes to external causes
E.g. A depressed woman being dumped by her boyfriend because she is bad
- There are some therapies that help to change this attribution pattern,
e.g. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)
## Impression formation
The process we form the impression of another person
- affects how we react to that person later
- carries a long-lasting and powerful effects on our perception
### First impression
- Before, Social psychologists concluded that the first impression is formed very quickly but usually inaccurate
- But recent research showed that even with ‘thin slices’ of information, the first impression formed is relatively *accurate*
**Thin-slicing:** Drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior
- The formation of the first impression takes a few seconds (!!)
### Implicit Personality Theories
- The beliefs about which characteristics would go together
- When a person possesses some traits, he also possesses others as well
E.g. Ice is nice and friendly, then she must be cooperative
E.g. Josephine is lazy and impolite, then she must be irresponsible
- People also have implicit beliefs about birth order
1st – more intelligent, responsible, obedient, stable
Last born – most creative, emotional, disobedient
Only – most disagreeable, self-centred
### Impression management
How can we produce/create a favorable first impression on other people?
**Tactics:**
- Self-enhancement (appearance, self-introduction)
- Other-enhancement (agree with others to make others feel good)

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# 3. SOCIAL COGNITION
> PSYG 2504 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
**Social cognition:**
- How people think about themselves and the social world (Aronson, Wilson & Sommers, 2021).
- How we select, interpret, remember, and use social information to help us make judgements and decisions (Aronson, Wilson & Sommers, 2021)
**The three approaches we often use:**
- Heuristics
- Schemas (概要)
- Affect and cognition
**Automatic Thinking:**
Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless (Heuristics & Schemas).
Low-effort thinking (vs. High-effort thinking: thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary and effortful)
## Heuristics (mental shortcuts)
*People use to make judgements quickly and efficiently.*
**Information overload: Demands for our cognitive systems > our cognitive capacity (especially under stressful situations).**
We have too much information, Heuristics let us do more, with less effort.
**Types of heuristics:**
- Representativeness
- Availability
- Anchoring and adjustment
- Status quo
### Representativeness heuristic
*A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.*
The judgments are often accurate because we follow the group norms in behavior and style.
**Possible error:**
- *Base rates* – the frequency with a given event/patterns occur in the total population
- *Discounting other important information*
### Availability heuristic
*A strategy to make judgments based on how *easily* specific kinds of information brought to our mind.*
The more easily recall something (something dramatic), the greater its impact on subsequent judgments or decisions.
**We are more easily to retrieve the information on our familiar task for making judgments.**
Judgements about objects that we are personally familiar with (e.g. consumer brands) are influenced by ease of retrieval more than judgments about brands that we are less familiar with
**Possible error:**
overestimate the probability of events that are dramatic but rare.
E.g. car accidents vs flight accidents
### Anchoring and adjustment
*The tendency to use something we know (anchor) as a starting point to which we then make adjustments to deal with uncertainty.*
- We use particular standard as a starting point (anchor), then try to determine if we should guess higher or lower than the starting point (adjustment) (DeLamater & Myers, 2011)
- We use ‘self’ as the anchor
### Problem: Negative Bias
*The fact that we show greater sensitivity and likely to remember the negative information than to positive information.*
## Schemas
*Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about and remember.*
- Including our knowledge about other people, ourselves, social roles (e.g. what a lecturer is like), and specific events.
- Help us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge.
- Particularly useful in confusing or ambiguous situations.
#### Advantages of Schematic Processing
Schemas aid and speed up information processing:
- Help remember or interpret new information
- Be more efficient
- Fill in the gaps in our knowledge
- Perceive and label the new information which is consistent or inconsistent with the schemas
- Reduce ambiguous elements in the situation
### Limitations of Schematic Processing
People fill in gaps with information that does not belong but is schema-consistent.
People may ignore information which does belong but is schema-inconsistent
Selective attention.
**Halo effect (Thorndike, 1920):** A general bias in which a favorable or unfavorable general impression of a person affects our inferences and future expectations about that person.
#### Confirmation bias (confirmatory hypothesis testing)
*A tendency to search for information that confirms our original hypotheses and beliefs.*
People are overly accepting of information that fits a schema.
Snyder and Swann (1978) asked 50% of their participants to find out if the other person they were interviewing was an extrovert (easy-going and sociable), and the other half to find out if s/he was an introvert (shy and withdrawn).
People tended to select questions from a provided list that confirmed the hypothesis they were testing.
Holding an opposite hypothesis or having a need for valid information reduces the degree to which people selectively confirm hypotheses.
#### Self-fulfilling prophecies
*People have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true.*
**Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) study:**
Gave IQ test to all students in an elementary school in San Francisco
Told the teachers that some of the students scored very high in an IQ test and were promising.
They predicted that this information would activate the schemas (expectations) towards these students and thus their behavior toward them.
In fact, the names of those “good” students were chosen randomly; all other students had become the control group.
Result?
Those “high” IQ students shown a larger improvement in another IQ test 8 months later compared with the control group.
Further research (Rosenthal, 1994) indicated that teachers gave the bloomers more attention, more challenging tasks, more and better feedback, and more opportunities to respond in class
In other words, their expectation, which has no grounds, has come true.
A self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when we act on our impressions of others
On the contrary, teachers’ lower expectancies for success for minority students or females often undermined the confidence of these groups and actually contributed to poorer performance by them (e.g., Sadker & Sadker, 1994).
Snyder, Tanke, and Berscheid (1977) gave male students a photograph of either an attractive or unattractive woman whom they were talking with over the phone for 10 minutes.
In fact, the photos were fake and were randomly assigned to women regardless of their true looks.
Men who believed they were talking to a more attractive woman behaved more warmly. The woman in turn seemed more sociable, friendly, and likeable.
#### Belief perseverance (perseverance effect)
*Schemas remain unchanged even in face of contradictory information (e.g. Kunda & Oleson, 1995).*
e.g. 20 years ago, we found it hard to believe a priest or a teacher would molest children.
It is very difficult to demolish a belief once we have established a rationale of the belief.
## Affect and cognition
*When we are in good mood, we tend to perceive everything in positive manner (people, the world, ideas…). *
Mood congruence effects,Mood dependent memory.
- Creativity - Positive mood increase creativity
- The use of heuristic processing – positive mood people use more heuristic processing in dealing with problems
- The interpretation of others’ motives – positive mood tends to promote attributions of positive motives, vice versa
Affect influences what specific information is retrieved from memory.
Current memory becomes a retrieval cue.

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# 4. Attitudes
> PSYG2504 Social Psychology
*Our <u>evaluations</u> of any aspects of the social world (including people, objects and ideas).*
Feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond favorably or unfavorably to objects, people, and events
## Attitudes
**Three components of attitude:**
### Affectively Based Attitude
*An attitude based more on people’s feelings and values.*
Regarding the positive and negative feelings regarding the stimulus.
People vote more with their hearts than their minds.
We feel strongly attracted to something (or a person), despite the negative belief about him/her (e.g. knowing that the person is a “bad influence”).
### Behaviorally Based Attitude
*An attitude based on observations of how one behaves toward an object.*
Based on observations of how one behaviors toward an object.
Do you like Apple products? If you use many Apple products, you may think you really like this brand.
### Cognitively Based Attitude
*An attitude based on people’s beliefs about the properties of an attitude object.*
Implicit attitudes are rooted in people’s childhood experiences, while explicit attitudes are formed in recent experiences (Rudman, Phelan & Heppen, 2007).
- **Explicit attitudes**
Consciously endorse and easily to report
E.g. I dislike people who are always late
- **Implicit attitudes**
Exist outside of conscious awareness
Test by Implicit Association Test (IAT)
### Attitudes influence Cognitions
IAT: a test that measures the speed with which people can pair a target face (e.g. Black/White, old/young; Asian/White) with positive or negative stimuli (e.g. the words honest or evil) reflecting unconscious (implicit) prejudices.
People respond more quickly when white faces are paired with positive words and vice versa.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html
## Attitudes formation
### Social learning
*The process that we acquire new information, forms of behavior, or attitudes from other people.*
i.e. by interacting with others, or observing others’ behaviors (imitation)
Social learning occurs in three processes:
- Classical conditioning (learning based on association)
- Instrumental/operant conditioning (rewards)
- Observational learning
### Classical conditioning
*A basic form of learning in which one stimulus, initially neutral, acquires the capacity to evoke reactions through repeated pairing with another stimulus.*
### Instrumental/operant conditioning
*A form of learning whereby a behavior followed by a positive response is more likely to be repeated.*
E.g. Insko (1965) showed that participants’ responses to an attitude survey were influenced by positive feedback on the responses they gave a week earlier.
Reinforcing one’s attitudes with positive feedback means that the attitudes are more likely to survive and be expressed on other occasions.
### Observational learning
*A basic form of learning in which individuals acquire new forms of behavior as a result of observing others.*
## Attitudes predict deliberative behavior
### Theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991)
Several factors, including subjective norms, attitudes towards the behavior and perceived behavioral control, determine behavioral intentions concerning the behavior, and, in turn, intentions strongly determine whether the behavior is performed.
![Picture1.jpg](https://photo-1303301880.cos.ap-guangzhou.myqcloud.com/2024/05/11/663f827e3d12e.jpg)
## Why does action/behaviour affect our attitude?
### Cognitive dissonance
*The discomfort that is caused when two cognitions conflict, or when our behavior conflicts with our attitudes.*
Dissonance is most painful, and we are most motivated to reduce it, when one of the dissonant cognitions challenge our self-esteem (Aronson, 1969)
#### Three ways to reduce dissonance:
- Changing our behavior to make it consistent with the cognition/attitude.
- Attempting to justify our behavior through changing one of the dissonant cognition/attitude.
- Attempting to justify our behavior by adding new cognitions.
#### Less-leads-to-more effect
*Less reasons or rewards for an action often leads to greater attitude change.*
**Festinger and Carlsmith’s (1959) experiment: **
Performing a dull task for an hour: turning wooden knobs.
Effect of preconceptions on performance.
Manipulation: \$1, \$20 or no lie.
Results?
#### Insufficient Justification
*The less incentive one has for performing a counter-attitudinal behavior, the more dissonance is experienced.*
Needs to reduce the dissonance internally Vs Overjustification effect.
The effect of promising a reward for doing what one already likes to do
the person may now see the reward, rather than intrinsic interest, as the motivation for performing the task.
Children promised a reward for playing an interesting puzzle or toy
**Four conditions to produce dissonance:**
1. The person has to realize that the *inconsistency has negative consequences* – e.g. the smokers realize smoking causes ill health
2. The person has to *take responsibility* for the action – e.g. smokers are freely responsible for the decision to smoke
3. The person has to *experience physiological arousal* – e.g. smoking causes anxiety as it could cause ill health
4. The person has to *attribute the feeling of physiological arousal to the action itself* - e.g. smokers need to be able to link the feeling and the behaviour
#### Alternative strategies to resolve/reduce dissonance
- Change the behaviour to more consistent with our attitude.
E.g. smoking fathers quit smoking.
- Acquiring new information to support our behaviour.
E.g. finding evidence that smoking away from the children would do no harm.
- Deciding that the dissonance is not important.
Smoking in the presence of children is not important.
#### Indirect methods to reduce dissonance
**To restore positive self-evaluations:**
*Self-affirmation – restoring positive self-evaluations that are threatened by the dissonance.*
E.g. Smoking father does not focus on his smoking behavior; but a responsible father as he earns the living.
#### Dissonance can be a tool for beneficial changes in behavior
*Hypocrisy induction – The arousal of dissonance by having individuals make statements that run counter to their behaviors and then reminding them of the inconsistency between what they advocated and their behavior.*
The purpose is to lead individuals to more responsible behavior.
Aronson, Fried, & Stone (1991); Stone et al. (1994)
Asking college students to compose a speech describing the dangers of AIDS, advocating the use of condoms (safe sex)
Group 1: students merely composed the arguments
Group 2: after composing the arguments, the students were to recite them in front of a video camera and were told that the audience were high school students
Highest dissonance: Group 2
### Self-perception theory (Bem, 1972)
*When we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer our attitudes from our behavior and the circumstances in which this behavior occurs.*
e.g. You choose to eat oranges from a basket of seven kinds of fruit and somebody asks you how you feel about oranges.
For 10 years the Cognitive dissonance theory was the only theoretical interpretation of effects of behaviors on attitude change.
Self-perception theory and cognitive dissonance theory make similar predictions but for different reasons.
Same prediction on Festinger and Carlsmith’s (1957) experiment.
#### Why the actions affect the attitudes?
- Cognitive dissonance theory – we justify our behavior to reduce the internal discomfort
- Self-perception theory – we observe the behavior and make reasonable inferences about our attitude
#### Both theories may be correct:
- Self-perception theory seems more applicable when people are unfamiliar with the issues or the issues are vague, minor, or uninvolving
- Cognitive dissonance theory seems more applicable to explaining people’s behavior concerning controversial, engaging, and enduring issues