Topic 4.2 Notes – Attitude Formation and Attitude Change

Attitudes, Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

An attitude is an evaluation of a person, group, object, issue, or behavior. You can like it, dislike it, or feel mixed about it.

Its three parts often show up together:

• Cognitive component = beliefs or thoughts
  • “That group is hardworking.”
• Affective component = feelings or emotional reactions
  • “I feel uneasy around them.”
• Behavioral component = actions or tendencies to act
  • avoiding, helping, trusting, excluding

A stereotype is a generalized concept about a group. It’s the belief part. A prejudice is an unjustifiable, usually negative attitude toward a group. Discrimination is unjustifiable negative behavior toward people because of their group membership.

One easy way to organize those terms is to match them to the three components of attitudes.

Attitude components linked to stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination

Keep the relationship straight:

• stereotype → prejudice → discrimination
• The arrows also go backward because behavior and experience can reinforce the original belief.

Why stereotypes happen at all:

• your brain uses categorization and schemas to reduce cognitive load
• that makes quick judgments easier
• but it can also distort judgment by treating group patterns as if they describe every person

Stereotypes can be:

• negative
• positive
• “neutral” seeming

All three still overgeneralize.

Common sources of attitudes and stereotypes include cultural norms, family and peers, schools and institutions, media portrayals, direct experience, and observational learning or conditioning.

Explicit and Implicit Attitudes and the Biases They Produce

Explicit attitudes are conscious and reportable. Researchers usually measure them with surveys, interviews, or rating scales. One problem is social desirability, which means people may answer in a way that looks acceptable.

Implicit attitudes are automatic evaluations a person may not recognize or may not admit. They can differ from explicit beliefs. They’re often studied with indirect measures such as the Implicit Association Test.

Important AP caution: implicit measures show patterns and probabilities, not certainty about one person or one action.

Bias patterns

• Just-world phenomenon
  • belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get
  • this often leads to victim blaming
• Out-group homogeneity bias
  • seeing out-group members as more alike than in-group members
  • “they’re all the same”
• In-group bias
  • favoring your own group in trust, help, rewards, or judgments
  • Tajfel’s minimal-group studies showed even random group assignment can create favoritism
• Ethnocentrism
  • judging other cultures by your own culture’s standards
  • treating your own culture as normal or superior

How Stereotypes and Implicit Attitudes Shape Thinking and Behavior

These attitudes can affect:

• attention you notice stereotype-consistent info
• interpretation ambiguous behavior gets filtered through expectations
• memory stereotype-consistent examples may stick better
• decision-making especially in hiring, discipline, and opportunity

They matter most when:

• decisions are fast
• information is ambiguous
• clear criteria are missing

They can also change how much evidence someone needs before judging a person. That helps create a self-reinforcing cycle:

• expectations shape treatment
• treatment shapes outcomes
• outcomes seem to confirm the stereotype

Reducing biased effects usually means slowing decisions, setting objective criteria in advance, using individuating information, and checking outcomes for patterns.

Belief Perseverance and Confirmation Bias

Belief perseverance means holding onto a belief even after evidence shows it is wrong or the original evidence is discredited.

Confirmation bias means seeking, noticing, interpreting, and remembering information that supports what you already believe.

The distinction is tested a lot:

• confirmation bias = biased information processing
• belief perseverance = continued belief despite contrary evidence

Stereotypes often survive because people treat counterexamples as “exceptions.” Classic findings showed that when people got false evidence, then later learned it was fabricated, they often kept part of the belief anyway, especially after generating their own explanation. Correction works better when people get an alternative explanation, not just “that was false.”

Cognitive Dissonance and Attitude Change

Cognitive dissonance is mental discomfort from inconsistency between attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

People reduce it by:

• changing behavior
• changing attitude
• adding justification
• minimizing the inconsistency
• avoiding dissonance-producing information

Dissonance is stronger when the issue matters, the behavior feels freely chosen, and there is insufficient external justification.

A simple way to picture it is that a mismatch between belief and action raises dissonance, and people then try to bring it back down by changing the belief, changing the action, or reinterpreting the action.

Cognitive dissonance resolution

Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959:

1. Participants did a boring task.
2. They told someone it was enjoyable.
3. They were paid either $1 or $20.
4. The $1 group later rated the task as more enjoyable.

Why? $1 was not enough external justification, so they changed their attitude to reduce dissonance. The $20 group had enough outside reason.

Related forms you should know:

• postdecision dissonance after choosing between two attractive options
• effort justification when people value something more after working hard for it

Belief perseverance and dissonance can both keep attitudes in place, but they are different. Belief perseverance is failure to update a belief. Cognitive dissonance is the push to restore internal consistency.