Chapter 6 Notes
Attitude: How one feels about something in general (I have a positive attitude towards basketball).
Balance theory: the theory that people try to maintain balance among their beliefs, cognitions, and sentiments.
Cognitive dissonance theory: the theory that inconsistencies between a person’s thoughts, sentiments, and actions create an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency.
Effort justification: the tendency to reduce dissonance by finding reasons for why we have devoted time, effort, or money to something that has turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing.
Induced compliance: subtly compelling individuals to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values, which typically leads to dissonance and to a change in their original attitudes or values in order to reduce their dissonance.
Interpersonal simulations: experiments in which an “observer-participant” is given a detailed description of one condition of a dissonance experiment, is told how a participant behaved in that situation, and is asked to predict the attitude of that participant.
Self-affirmation: bolstering our identity and self-esteem by taking note of important elements of our identity, such as our important values.
Self-perception theory: a theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be.
System justification theory: the theory that people are motivated to see the existing political and social status quo as desirable, fair, and legitimate.
Terror management theory: the theory that people deal with the potentially paralyzing anxiety that comes with the knowledge of the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through the preservation of a valued worldview and the conviction that one has lived up to its values and prescriptions.
How well do attitudes predict behaviors?
Balance theory: the theory that people try to maintain balance among their beliefs, cognitions, and sentiments.
Cognitive dissonance theory: the theory that inconsistencies between a person’s thoughts, sentiments, and actions create an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency.
Effort justification: the tendency to reduce dissonance by finding reasons for why we have devoted time, effort, or money to something that has turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing.
Induced compliance: subtly compelling individuals to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values, which typically leads to dissonance and to a change in their original attitudes or values in order to reduce their dissonance.
Interpersonal simulations: experiments in which an “observer-participant” is given a detailed description of one condition of a dissonance experiment, is told how a participant behaved in that situation, and is asked to predict the attitude of that participant.
Self-affirmation: bolstering our identity and self-esteem by taking note of important elements of our identity, such as our important values.
Self-perception theory: a theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be.
System justification theory: the theory that people are motivated to see the existing political and social status quo as desirable, fair, and legitimate.
Terror management theory: the theory that people deal with the potentially paralyzing anxiety that comes with the knowledge of the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through the preservation of a valued worldview and the conviction that one has lived up to its values and prescriptions.
How well do attitudes predict behaviors?