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Attitude
 Favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward
something or someone
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict
Our Behavior?
 People’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted their
varying behaviors
 Student attitudes toward cheating bore little relation to
the likelihood of their cheating
 Attitudes toward the church were only modestly linked
with worship attendance on any given Sunday
 Self-described racial attitudes provided little clue to
behaviors in actual situations
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict
Our Behavior?
 When Attitudes Predict Behavior
 When social influences on what we say are minimal


Implicit
 Implicit association test (IAT)
 Implicit biases are pervasive
 People differ in implicit bias
 People are often unaware of their implicit biases
Explicit
 When other influences on behavior are minimal
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict
Our Behavior?
 When Attitudes Are Specific to the Behavior
 When attitudes specific to the behavior are examined
 When attitudes are Potent


Bringing Attitudes to Mind
Forging Strong Attitudes Through Experience
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When Does Our Behavior Affect
Our Attitudes?
 Role Playing
 Role

Set of norms that defines how people in a given social position
ought to behave
 Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford’s prison study

Abu Ghraib controversy
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When Does Our Behavior Affect
Our Attitudes?
 When Saying Becomes Believing
 When there is no compelling external explanation for
one’s words, saying becomes believing
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When Does Our Behavior Affect
Our Attitudes?
 Evil and Moral Acts
 Wartime


Actions and attitudes feed on each other
When evil behavior occurs we tend to justify it as right
 Peacetime

Moral action, especially when chosen rather than coerced,
affects moral thinking
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When Does Our Behavior Affect
Our Attitudes?
 Interracial Behavior and Racial Attitudes
 Racial behaviors help shape our social consciousness

By doing, not saying racial attitudes were changed
 Legislating morality
 Social Movements
 Political and social movements may legislate behavior
designed to lead to attitude change on a mass scale
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Self-Presentation: Impression Management
 Assumes that people, especially those who self-monitor
their behavior hoping to create good impressions, will
adapt their attitude reports to appear consistent with
their actions
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Self-Justification: Cognitive Dissonance
 Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of
two inconsistent cognitions

To reduce this tension, we adjust our thinking
 Insufficient justification

Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s
behavior when external justification is “insufficient”
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Self-Justification: Cognitive Dissonance
 Dissonance after decisions


Deciding-becomes-believing effect
Can breed overconfidence
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Self-Perception Theory
 When we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them
much as would someone observing us, by looking at our
behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs


Expressions and attitude
Overjustification and intrinsic motivations
Copyright 2016 © McGraw-Hill Education. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Comparing the Theories
 Dissonance Theory
 Self-Perception Theory
 Dissonance as Arousal
 Self-Perceiving when Not Self-Contradicting
 Changing Ourselves Through Action
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