Attitude and Social Cognition

Three concepts in the book explain attitude change. Fritz Heider's balance concept is often described as the P-O-X triangle: P is the person whose attitude is being studied, O is another person, and X is the attitude object. Each relation is positive or negative. A state of imbalance — which pushes towards attitude change — exists when all three sides of the triangle are negative, or when two sides are positive and one is negative. Balance exists when all three sides are positive, or when two are negative and one is positive.

Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance emphasises the cognitive component: the cognitions in an attitude must be consonant, or consistent, with each other. If two cognitions are dissonant — "pan masala causes cancer" and "I eat pan masala" — the person feels discomfort and changes one of them to restore consonance. In a classic experiment by Festinger and Carlsmith, students who had done a dull task were paid either one dollar or twenty dollars to tell the next participant it was interesting; those paid only one dollar later rated the task as more interesting, because with so little justification they reduced the dissonance by changing their own attitude. S.M. Mohsin, an Indian psychologist, proposed the two-step concept. In the first step the target of change identifies with the source — the person through whom change is to be brought about — who should have a positive attitude and regard towards the target, and whom the target likes. In the second step the source shows an attitude change, by actually changing his or her behaviour towards the attitude object; the target, imitating the source, then changes too.

Attitudes do not always predict behaviour. Behaviour is more likely to be consistent with an attitude when the attitude is strong and central; when the person is aware of it; when there is little or no external pressure; when the behaviour is not being watched or evaluated by others; and when the behaviour is likely to have a positive consequence. The classic demonstration is LaPiere's study in the United States in the 1930s: he travelled with a Chinese couple and they were served at almost every hotel and restaurant, yet when the same places were later asked by letter whether they would serve Chinese guests, most said they would not. What people said and what they did had come apart.

Prejudices are attitudes towards a particular group, usually negative, and in many cases based on stereotypes — clusters of ideas about the characteristics of a group, which form the cognitive component. When a prejudice is translated into action it becomes discrimination, the behavioural component: people are treated unfairly because they belong to a group. The book identifies five sources of prejudice: learning, through association, reward and punishment, observation, group norms and information; a strong social identity and ingroup bias; scapegoating, in which the majority blames a minority outgroup for its social, economic or political problems; the kernel-of-truth concept, the belief that a stereotype must contain some truth; and the self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the group that is the target of prejudice comes to behave in ways that confirm it.

Strategies for handling prejudice work on those sources: minimising the opportunities to learn prejudices, changing prejudiced attitudes, de-emphasising a narrow social identity based on the ingroup, and discouraging the self-fulfilling prophecy among its victims. In practice they are pursued through education and the spread of information; increasing intergroup contact, which reduces prejudice when the groups meet in a cooperative context, interact closely, and are not different in power or status; and highlighting individual identity rather than group identity, which weakens the basis of prejudice.

Social cognition refers to the mental processes involved in gathering and processing information about people and social situations. It is guided by schemas — mental structures that provide a framework, set of rules or guidelines for processing information about any object. Schemas in the form of categories are prototypes, concepts defined by a set of typical features; group-centred schemas are stereotypes. Schemas save effort, but they can also produce errors when they are applied to people they do not fit.

In impression formation a perceiver forms an impression of a target person through selection of information, its organisation and inference about what the person is like. Solomon Asch showed that some traits are central: when a list of traits describing a person included "warm", participants formed a far more favourable overall impression than when the same list had "cold" instead, while swapping "polite" and "blunt" changed little. Order matters too. In the primacy effect the information presented first has a stronger effect than information presented later; in the recency effect the information presented last has the stronger effect. In the halo effect a perceiver assumes that a person who has one positive quality is likely to have other positive qualities as well.

Attribution is assigning causes to behaviour. Fritz Heider distinguished internal (dispositional) causes — something about the person, such as ability or effort — from external (situational) causes, such as task difficulty or luck; causes can also be classified as stable (ability, task difficulty) or unstable (effort, luck). Attribution has systematic errors. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to give greater weight to internal or dispositional factors than to external or situational factors when explaining other people's behaviour. People also tend to attribute their own success to internal factors and their failure to external factors. The actor–observer effect is the difference between the attribution we make for our own experience (as actor) and for someone else's (as observer): if I fail a test I blame its difficulty, but if another person fails I am likely to blame his lack of ability or effort.