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Attitudes are enduring beliefs and feelings that influence how people think, feel, and act toward objects, people, or events. Understanding how attitudes are formed and changed is essential for explaining human behavior and social dynamics. Attitudes develop through various processes, such as personal experiences, social interactions, and exposure to media. They can also change over time, influenced by factors like persuasion, cognitive dissonance, and social norms.
Stereotypes
Stereotypes are beliefs about people based on their membership in a particular group. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neutral. Stereotypes based on gender, ethnicity, or occupation are common in many societies.
Examples: People may stereotype women as nurturing or used car salespeople as dishonest.
Stereotypes are not easily changed for the following reasons:
- When people encounter instances that disconfirm their stereotypes of a particular group, they tend to assume that those instances are atypical subtypes of the group.
- People’s perceptions are influenced by their expectations.
- People selectively recall instances that confirm their stereotypes and forget about disconfirming instances.
Stereotypes have several important functions:
- They allow people to quickly process new information about an event or person.
- They organize people’s past experiences.
- They help people to meaningfully assess differences between individuals and groups.
- They help people to make predictions about other people’s behavior.
While stereotypes can provide a mental shortcut for processing information and reducing cognitive load, they can also lead to biased perceptions and behaviors. By categorizing individuals into groups, stereotypes allow people to make quick judgments, but these judgments may lack accuracy and nuance, leading to harmful assumptions.
The word stereotype has developed strong negative connotations for very good reasons. Negative stereotypes of different groups of people can have a terrible influence on those people’s lives. However, most people do rely on stereotypes nearly every day to help them function in society. For example, say a woman has to work late and finds herself walking home alone on a dark city street. Walking toward her is a group of five young men talking loudly and roughhousing. The woman crosses the street and enters a convenience store until the young men pass, then continues on her way. Most people would say she acted prudently, even though she relied on a stereotype to guide her behavior.
Stereotypes can lead to distortions of reality for several reasons:
- They cause people to exaggerate differences among groups.
- They lead people to focus selectively on information that agrees with the stereotype and ignore information that disagrees with it.
- They tend to make people see other groups as overly homogeneous, even though people can easily see that the groups they belong to are heterogeneous.
Stereotypes can both cause and result from bias-infused experiences. For instance, someone who holds a stereotype about a group may interpret ambiguous behavior in a way that confirms their belief, reinforcing the stereotype over time. Additionally, stereotypes can influence behaviors and interactions in ways that perpetuate social inequalities. For example, biased hiring practices or assumptions about someone’s abilities based on their group membership can limit opportunities for individuals, creating systemic barriers. While stereotypes may help reduce cognitive effort in certain situations, pure reliance on them often leads to unfair treatment, perpetuation of bias, and misunderstanding.
Prejudice
A prejudice is a negative belief or feeling about a particular group of individuals based on stereotypes. Discrimination involves acting on one or more prejudices. Prejudices are often passed on from one generation to the next. Prejudice is a destructive phenomenon, and it is pervasive because it serves many psychological, social, and economic functions:
- Prejudice allows people to avoid doubt and fear.
- Prejudice gives people scapegoats to blame in times of trouble.
- Prejudice can boost self-esteem through downward social comparison.
- Evolutionary psychologists suggest that prejudice allows people to bond with their own group by contrasting their own groups to outsider groups.
- Prejudice legitimizes discrimination because it apparently justifies one group’s dominance over another.
Measuring Prejudice
Researchers find it difficult to measure prejudice. One reason for this is that people differ in the type and extent of prejudice they harbor. For example, a person who makes demeaning comments about a particular ethnic group may be bigoted or just ignorant. Also, people often do not admit to being prejudiced.
People may often have implicit, unconscious prejudices even when they do not have explicit prejudices. Researchers assess implicit prejudice in three ways:
- Some researchers assess attitudes that suggest prejudice, such as a strong emotional objection to affirmative action.
- Some researchers observe behavior rather than assess attitudes. People’s behavior in stressful situations may be particularly useful at revealing implicit prejudice.
- Some researchers assess the unconscious associations people have about particular groups.
Implicit Attitudes
Implicit attitudes are unconscious beliefs that can still influence decisions and behavior. These attitudes can operate automatically and can shape perceptions, judgments, and behaviors in subtle but significant ways. Implicit attitudes often reflect societal norms, cultural influences, or personal experiences, even when these attitudes conflict with consciously-held beliefs.
Just-World Hypothesis
Research has demonstrated how implicit attitudes can lead to negative evaluations of others and reinforce social biases. For example, the just-world hypothesis refers to the need to believe that the world is fair and that people get what they deserve, leading to unconscious blame of individuals for their misfortunes. Someone might think that a person facing poverty is lazy or irresponsible rather than a victim of systemic issues or bad luck. The just world hypothesis gives people a sense of security and helps them to find meaning in difficult circumstances. Unfortunately, the just world hypothesis also leads to a tendency to blame the victim. When something tragic or terrible happens to someone, people often reassure themselves by deciding that the person must have done something to provoke or cause the event.
Ingroups and Outgroups
Other implicit biases include outgroup homogeneity bias, which is the tendency to perceive members of an outgroup as being more alike to each other than members of one’s ingroup. This bias can lead to overgeneralizations about groups and a failure to appreciate individual differences within those groups. Ingroup bias refers to a preference for and favorable treatment of members of one’s own group, which can unconsciously reinforce group divisions and social hierarchies.
People’s social identities depend on the groups they belong to. From a person’s perspective, any group they belong to is an ingroup, and any group they don’t belong to is an outgroup. People generally have a lower opinion of outgroup members and a higher opinion of members of their own group. People who identify strongly with a particular group are more likely to be prejudiced against people in competing outgroups.
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is the implicit belief that one’s own cultural group is superior to others, using one’s cultural norms and values as a standard for judging others. It leads to ingroup bias, where individuals favor and positively evaluate their own group while negatively judging outgroups. Ethnocentrism influences behavior and mental processes by fostering us-versus-them thinking, contributing to stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination against those perceived as different.
Ethnocentrism often arises from limited exposure to other cultures and can perpetuate implicit biases and negative stereotypes. It is a major factor in social conflict and influences how individuals interpret and respond to diversity. Examples include cultural misunderstandings, xenophobia, and biased attitudes toward traditions or practices different from one’s own. Ethnocentrism contrasts with cultural relativism, which involves evaluating cultural practices within their own context.
Attitude Formation and Change
Attitudes are learned evaluations of people, objects, or ideas that influence behavior and mental processes. They develop through experiences, social interactions, and exposure to cultural norms. Attitudes can be shaped by both conscious thought and unconscious influences, making them flexible and subject to change.
Belief Perseverance
Belief perseverance is the tendency for individuals to hold onto their beliefs even when presented with evidence to the contrary. This phenomenon occurs because people often focus on information that supports their existing beliefs while disregarding or rationalizing contradictory evidence. A cognitive bias that supports belief perseverance is confirmation bias, the tendency to search, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms preexisting beliefs or attitudes.
Example: A person who believes a certain diet is effective might focus on testimonials from individuals who had success with the diet, while ignoring or dismissing scientific studies or data that suggest it is ineffective. Similarly, in social or political contexts, people may selectively consume media that aligns with their viewpoints, reinforcing their beliefs and limiting exposure to alternative perspectives. This resistance to change can lead to flawed decision-making and hinder the acceptance of new information.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological discomfort experienced when a person’s actions and attitudes are inconsistent with one another. This conflict creates mental tension that motivates individuals to reduce the discomfort by bringing their behavior and beliefs into harmony. The theory of cognitive dissonance highlights how people strive for internal consistency in their thoughts and actions.
To reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, individuals may:
1. Change their behavior to align with their attitudes or beliefs.
Example: Smokers who believe smoking is harmful may quit smoking to reduce dissonance.
2. Change their attitudes or beliefs to align with their behavior.
Example: Smokers may convince themselves that smoking isn’t as harmful as experts claim.
3. Add new cognitions to justify the inconsistency (rationalization).
Example: Smokers might rationalize their habit by thinking, “Smoking helps me manage stress, so it’s worth it.”
Cognitive dissonance plays a role in decision-making and attitude change. When people invest time, effort, or resources into a choice, they are more likely to adjust their attitudes to justify their actions, even if the outcome is disappointing. This phenomenon, known as effort justification, can influence behaviors like sticking with a difficult task or defending a controversial decision.
Dissonance Theory: Leon Festinger’s dissonance theory proposes that people change their attitudes when they have attitudes that are inconsistent with each other. Festinger said that people experience cognitive dissonance when they have related cognitions that conflict with one another. Cognitive dissonance results in a state of unpleasant tension. People try to reduce the tension by changing their attitudes.
Example: Sydney is against capital punishment. She participates in a debate competition and is assigned to a team that has to argue for capital punishment. Subsequently, she is more amenable to the idea of capital punishment.
