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Social Psychology: Attitudes and Persuasion Someone attitude is their perception of objects of thought, these are things such as social issues, products, and the people around them(l). There are three parts to your attitude, the cognitive, affective, and behavioral parts (1). Your cognitive component is your beliefs about certain objects(l). The affective part is your emotional feelings that are caused be the objects, and the behavioral part is the way you act toward that object (1 It is common for different attitudes on social issues to fit together, even if o think that logically they shouldn’t (3).
Attitudes arena set in stone, they can be changed, this change is usually done with some type of persuasion. Persuasion can come from ads on television that try to make you feel a certain way towards a product, or in could come from the people around you in trying to get you to act in a certain way (1). It is easier to have you attitude changed if you don’t have a strong prior belief on the issue your dealing with. Persuasion also works best when you know and trust the person trying to persuade you, and they show a great deal of likeability (1).
Attitude can influence behavior, although the correlation of that is only . 38 (1). The stronger attitude you have toward something, the more likely it is that your behaving will agree with it (1). It is also true that if you have based your attitude on an experience rather than just learning about an occurrence, the bigger chance there is that your behavior will reflect your attitude (3). Even if someone has a certain attitude towards something, behavior often addends on the situation your in and the ways in which your expected to act with he people your around.
This leads to what we say, and what we do becoming two completely different things (2). Different people use different methods but there are certainly ways to change your attitudes and behavior. When the people around you have certain beliefs, observational learning can persuade you to have the same feelings and behavior as them (1). The agreement you then have with others, helps reinforce your attitude (1 The emotional part of someone attitude is learned by using classical conditioning and can be changed in that way (1).
Different theory of change include: the learning theory, dissonance theory, self perception theory, and the elaboration likelihood model (1). Self- perception theory is when people accept that they have a certain type of attitude solely on the behaviors they express (1). The elaboration likelihood model shows two different systems of persuasions is meet to chance someone attitude (1 The first is pretrial persuasion, which is based on non message factors such as attractiveness and credibility (1). The second is central out, which is when someone thinks about the actual content and logic behind the persuasion (1 ). N most cases, it is the central route that works the best (1). Another thing that can bring about change is having to think about the reasoning behind an attitude. If you don’t know why and don’t have strong feelings about it, sully the attitude will change in some way (3). Cognitive Dissonance Theory was created by Leon Festering and is widely believed still today in psychology (2). The theory says that people are motivated to stop the discomfort cause by having two inconsistent thoughts a difference in what we say and do) (3).