Attitudes, Emotions, Memory, and Learning: A Comprehensive Overview

Posted on Aug 22, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Attitudes & Emotions

Introduction

The concept of attitude, used by social psychologists, reflects a person’s overall view about something. It is socially learned and can be changed (e.g., a person’s attitude towards politics or religion).

Components of Attitude

Attitudes have three main components:

  • Cognitive: Information about something
  • Affective: Positive and negative emotions
  • Behavioral: Actual behavior

Attitude Formation

Attitudes can be formed through various ways:

  • Direct experience: e.g., playing basketball is fun
  • Social learning: e.g., religion X is good. This can overlap with stereotypes.
  • Self-image: A person feels defined by their attitude. e.g., “I believe in democracy,” “I like jazz music.” Defense mechanisms are used when an attack on an important attitude threatens the self. e.g., defending oneself by defending their religion.

Attitude Formula

One way to conceptualize attitude is through a formula:

Attitude = sum of (belief) (evaluation for each different attribute)

e.g., Calculation of attitude to cars (see text pg. 136-137):

A = (convenient 0.9)(Goodness 3) + (costly 0.6) (badness -1) + dangerous + pollutants + etc. = 2

Criticism:

  • The process of decomposition to attributes can be challenging. e.g., what are the attributes of UW? What are the attributes of a face?
  • The whole is often different than the sum of the parts. e.g., course evaluation, chair

Attitude Measurement

Measuring attitudes presents similar challenges to personality measurement:

  • e.g., “Here the only people who get promoted are those who toe the line & don’t make waves” (agree, neutral, disagree)
  • Attitude measures are very poor predictors of human behavior.
    • Similar problems to personality, such as the influence of the situation.
    • Intention vs. behavior. e.g., making a donation to UW. This is similar to the concept of strong and weak situations in personality.

Employee Opinion Surveys

Employee opinion surveys can be valuable tools, but they also present challenges:

  • What do we do with results?
    • Management’s panic (e.g., Bell’s management)
    • Setting up a committee, identifying problems, and taking action
  • Employee perception
    • Good opportunity to speak up. This can raise expectations and be viewed as therapeutic.
    • Perception of pressure to be positive. This can be linked to funding (e.g., Bell).
    • Perception of lack of anonymity.

Two Major Theories of Attitude Change (Consistency Theories):

1. Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance arises when two contradictory cognitions create tension, motivating the person to reduce dissonance.

  • Changing one of the cognitions: e.g., stop smoking, or “I am planning to quit.”
  • Adjusting the importance: e.g., “You can’t trust these researchers.”
  • Adding additional justifications: e.g., “It reduces stress, which is the number one killer.”

Experiments on cognitive dissonance:

  • Performing a routine task for $1 vs. $20
  • Attention to advertising
  • Group decision making

2. Heider’s Balance Theory

Heider’s balance theory describes a basic situation involving two people and an object, represented as a triangle. Each link is represented as either positive or negative.

  • Balanced system: The product of the signs is positive (either all positives, or two negatives).
  • Imbalanced system: The product of the signs is negative (either one negative, or three negatives). The motivation to reduce tension by achieving balance results in sign change towards one of the links.

e.g., attitude toward a movie (see next slide)

Examples of Heider’s Balance Theory:

  • Boss likes/dislikes something
  • Application to marketing (e.g., Beyoncé perfume)
  • Application to attitude change (e.g., LeBron James says drugs are bad)
  • Attitude change toward Bill Cosby

Emotions

Definition

Emotions are feelings towards a specific event or situation. e.g., seeing an old friend, being in a car accident.

Emotions have both physiological and cognitive components. Theories debate which comes first. e.g., the physiology of panic precedes the mental representation.

Role of Expectations

Expectations influence our emotional responses. Expectations are probabilities of future events.

  • Low probability events lead to either surprise or shock.
  • Formal and informal contracts at work. e.g., Pay & hours of work vs. expectation about civility at work.

Memory & Learning

Memory

Short Term vs. Long Term

  • e.g., looking up a phone number & dialing it vs. remembering it (888-4567)
  • Repeating and schemas. e.g., noting the pattern in the phone number.
    • Academic research on non-sense syllables. e.g., BOF, TAZ, TEJ
    • Natural memory. e.g., memory of a witness.
    • Retroactive vs. proactive interference. e.g., phone numbers (231-7677 & 321-6776), keyless car.

Memory as Construction

  • Query dependent: We don’t know how the information is organized. e.g., cannot retrieve based on date, or alphabetically.
  • Decay function: Forgetting is built into the memory system. e.g., what you ate 3 months ago.
  • Constancy in the number of items remembered: Remember attention as the bottleneck.
  • Recognition vs. recall: e.g., memory of faces.

Learning

Behaviourist’s Approach

Learning is an association between two items.

Two types of learning:

  • Classical conditioning: Association is between unconditioned Response & Stimulus. e.g., Pavlov’s dog, child’s fear of dogs.
  • Operant conditioning: Association is between Response & Consequence. e.g., Seal learning to jump through a hoop, child reading a book. This includes the concept of shaping. e.g., Skinner’s Walden Two.

Language of the Behaviourist

  • Acquisition (period in which a response is learned): e.g., learning to press a bar to get food.
  • Extinction (period it takes to stop responding): e.g., no food so no more bar presses.
  • Spontaneous recovery (bar pressing after extinction): e.g., bar pressing next time.
  • Superstitious behavior (unnecessary behaviors): e.g., lifting a leg while bar pressing.
  • Positive Reinforcement (desirable consequence of response): e.g., food for pressing the bar.
  • Negative Reinforcement (avoidance of undesirable consequence): e.g., escape learning.
  • Punishment (actual delivery of aversive consequence): e.g., electric shock if not moved. Note: Punishment results in controlling a response by Negative Reinforcement.

Reinforcement Schedule

  • Ratio: # of responses for one reinforcement. e.g., two bar presses for one food pellet.
  • Interval: amount of time to consequence. e.g., 30 seconds before the shock is delivered.
  • Paradox of random reinforcement: Extinction takes longer if the response was reinforced once in a while as opposed to every time. Why?

Application of Behaviourism

  • Popularity due to ease of understanding.
  • Analysis of behavior in terms of Stimulus, Response, and Reinforcement. e.g., managing the behavior of prisoners, programs for children with learning disabilities, Systematic desensitization.
  • Major difficulties of application:
    • Lack of control on reinforcements. e.g., work situations.
    • The learned response disappears with no Reinforcement. e.g., do prisoners still make their beds after release?

Problems with Behaviourism

  • Stimulus: Perception as opposed to a physical reality. Experiment on what is stimulus: dog learns to discriminate between two shades of grey.
  • Response: What are the units of behavior? e.g., counting problems in random reinforcement paradox. How many units of behavior when I take out my keys?
  • Reinforcement: Reinforcement is supposed to follow the behavior. Can it work differently in humans? e.g., little girl reading a book.
  • Reinforcement at work: e.g., planning for a promotion.

Cognitive & Social Theories

Tolman’s Cognitive Map

  • Experiment on learning a maze. Rat learns without reinforcement by watching another rat.
  • Notion of”Sign Gestal”. e.g., learning your way in a new city.

Lewin’s Theory

  • Differentiation of the parts. e.g., learning to drive a car.
  • Integration of parts into larger automatic units. e.g., looking at the side mirror before changing lane.

Social Learning

  • Bandura’s observation: Children imitate the whole pattern of behavior, macro units of behavior as opposed to micro. e.g., child imitating a professional basketball player.
  • Concept of self-efficacy: e.g.,”I can play my guitar well”

Experiential Learning

Kolb & Fry learning cycle. This has similarities to Kelly’s theory of personal constructs.

Organizational Learning

-> March & Olson model
Incomplete learning cycles in the model
1.Role constrained learning -> Break in the link between individuals’ beliefs & individuals’ actions e.g. employee may have ideas for improvement 2.Audience learning -> Break in the link between individuals’ actions & organizational actions e.g. manager’s suggestions are not accepted 3.Superstitious learning -> Break in the link between organizational actions & environmental responses e.g. advertising 4.Learning under ambiguity -> Break in the link between environmental responses & individuals’ beliefs e.g. market demand for small vs. big cars


Knowledge management -> 1.Difference between explicit & tacit knowledge e.g. riding a bicycle vs. adding numbers 2.Organizational practices -> #Lessons learned, politics of what gets included e.g. Ford #Knowledge management software -> #e.g. Bell’s new product introduction #Two major problems -> #Variability in product #Variability in description