Chapter Three

1. Chapter Three Attitudes, Beliefs, And Behavior Presenter: Tina Quicoli

2. Attitudes • An Attitude is defined as a favorable or unfavorable evaluation of an object or behavior. Example: Likes, Dislikes, Love, or Hate. • Sociologists are interested in the social content of the attitude. • Psychologists are interested in their formal theoretical nature, sources, and consequences.

3. Attitudes in Psychological Research • Attitudes are a complex of affairs that can’t be described by a numerical indicator. • However, the degree of favorableness or unfavorableness towards an object can be abstracted. • The attitude is an underlying disposition that is manifested in specific behaviors. • Belief about X >>> Attitude towards X >>> Intensions towards X >>> Behavior towards X. • A Persons belief about an object leads to their tendency towards the object.

4. Measuring Attitudes • There are several different ways to measure attitude strength. Scales are commonly used. • Types of scales: Extremity, Intensity, and Importance. • Non-attitudes are very weak attitude. On certain issues the public may lack an opinion. Thus, people often flip a mental coin or take a minute to establish their opinion before answering. • Questions may be answered at different levels of generality, general or specific, depending on knowledge about the object.

5. Attitude Change • Psychologists are interested in the effects of various forms of persuasion in creating or altering attitudes. • They bring subject into a controlled setting and conduct tests. • Sociologists are interested in a socially important attitude that shifts over a period of time. Their concern with attitude change is more descriptive. • Example: Change in racial attitudes over five years.

6. Attitudes and Their Cousins • Value: An enduring belief related to a specific mode of conduct that is preferred. • Norm: An expected standard for appropriate behavior and belief that is established and enforced by a group. • Schema: An organized and complex mental construct that evaluates a specific object. • Script: Prescribed sequence of behavior that is expected to occur in a particular setting. • Opinion: Similar to attitudes, but connote a more cognitive thought out view.

7. Chapter 4 Social Cognition Presenter: Tina Quicoli

8. Social Cognition • Social cognition can be defined as the structure, the process, and the content of knowledge. • It shapes the way we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world. • Social forces play a key factor in shaping cognition. • Cognition is thought, it is not emotions or behavior. However, it relates to these constructs. • Social cognition is dominant within Psychological S.P., but not in Sociology S.P.

9. Sociological Roots • Durkheim developed a theory of individual and collective psychology which proposed the notion of a collective representation of social life. • Weber asserted that macro-sociological phenomena do not exist independent from the individual. He analyzed large-scale social processes based on a theory of the individual. He also conceived of a meaningful act as social thought to which subjective meaning is attached. Lastly, his ideal types are the predecessors of the prototypes.

10. Mead viewed individuals as social. For him, society can only be understood as a system that is created and continuously recreated through social interaction. He also recognized the unique human capacity for using gestures and symbols in social interaction. • Schutz believed that social actors live in a subjectively perceived life-world. Individuals conform to predetermined situation that embody previous experiences, organized into stocks of knowledge. This is similar to the idea of the schema, scripts, or prototypes. • Question: Can you think of any other social theorists who are ancestors of social cognition?

11. Cognitive Structures • Cognitive Structures are organized representation of knowledge, the elements of cognition. • Humans have cognitive limits, it is impossible to process all incoming information. • Cognitive structures help to categorize and sort incoming information.

12. Prototypes are the tendencies of the characteristics that are associated with members of a category. • Schemas organize knowledge about a concept and shape how people view and use information. • Anchoring acts to incorporate new knowledge into preexisting systems. This involves abstracting thoughts and personifying aspects and creating visual representations.

13. Cognitive Processes • Cognitive processes go hand-in-hand with cognitive structures. • Attention: The focus of attention is the first step in processing information. Once a stimulus comes into focal attention it is identified, classifies, and given semantic meaning. • Memory: Once information is encoded it is available for retrieval. Memory retrieval involves activating information stored in long-term memory and bringing it into the short-term memory.

14. Cognitive Inferences • Information retrieved from memory is used to form cognitive inferences. • The process of social inferences involves combining information in order to form judgments. • First we gather relevant information. • Once we gather an adequate amount of information, we combine it to make social inferences.

15. Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that allow for information to be processed more efficiently. They are inferential strategies that help to reduce information. • Anchoring and adjustments are paired heuristics. An anchor is a starting point which is then adjusted to form a final judgment. • Inferential strategies are efficient, but they may lead to errors and prejudices. • Attributions refer to information of a causal inference. It is a judgment about what factors may produce an outcome or trait inferences that attaches a particular trait to an individual.

16. Sociology and Social Cognition • Sociologists recognize a broad definition of social cognition that recognizes all process of knowledge. • When concerned with all processes of knowledge, cognition is profoundly social. • Thus, social cognition should be understood in terms of a collective and individual cognitive process. • Sociologists are concerned with the social element embedded in the content of social knowledge and how that knowledge is created and used. • Cognitions are expressed through and are shaped by social interaction. • Cognition underlies interpersonal dynamics.

17. Collective/Social Cognition • Thoughts are processed collectively as well as individually. • Social cognition cannot be reduced to individual cognition. A person’s prototypes, stereotypes, and scripts are not simply given, they are negotiated, altered and redefined through social interaction. • Collective cognition refers to the collective nature of the processes that underlie the understanding of the social world. • The collective/social cognition emerges from the association with the individual, but they are separate from the individual.

18. Social Categorization • Social categorization is the process that constructs social knowledge stored in cognitive structures. • Classifying means to impose a certain notions about behavior or rules on a person. • Through categorization social knowledge shapes social phenomena. • Categories offer a prototype that provides a mental image of the person. • When a prototype is established it is given a positive or negative value.

19. Cognitive categories are significant to broader sociological phenomena. • Social categories are more than systems of cognitive organization, they reflect power relationships. • Social categorization leads to the legitimation of social stratification, which becomes part of the individual’s consciousness. • Social institutions maintain legitimacy through their effects on the self, serving to maintain social order. • Individual and Social categories then shape social behavior. • Question:How do you think cognitive categories lead to the domination of one social group over another and to the maintenance of the stratification system?

20. Cognition and Social Interaction • Interaction involves a minimum of 2 people. • The products of social cognition are messages communicated among people. • Language is the mechanism that allows for people to engage in self-interaction and it acts as a medium for exchange between people.

21. Cross-Cultural Perspective • S.P. findings are unique historical facts relating to certain conditions not universal truths. • S.P. has been largely a North American phenomenon. • It has been argued that many of the assumptions in S.P. are biased towards the U.S. • Understanding cross-cultural differences can enrich the understanding of cognition. • Cross-cultural difference should be understood within the unique context of the culture at hand. • Question: How can you explain cross-cultural differences in cognition?

22. Discussion on Postmodernism Presenter: Jesse Fletcher

23. Poststructuralismand Postmodernism • Breaking Down the Sign: Signifiers/Signifieds • Semiotic Circuit: Mass Media, Appropriation, and Recontextualization • Floating Signifiers • Simulations and the Hyperreal • Substituting signs of the real for reality • ‘The era of simulation is thus everywhere initiated by the interchangeability of previously contradictory or dialectically opposed terms.’ (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death) • Centeredness and Decenteredness • “Play” and the paradox of the center • Discussion Point: Kuhnian Paradigms as models of ‘centered’ science. Sociology as decentered science that makes claims towards being benefitted by being without a center/paradigm. Without anthropomorphizing sociology, can this be viewed as an example of Cognitive Dissonance? Why/Why Not?

24. So what! How does this apply? • As society becomes less real, do people give it more weight? Do people perceive it, or claim to perceive it, as MORE real? • If society was a ‘desert of the real,’ a hodgepodge of simulation/simulacrum, then would it not be characterized by a perpetual state of insufficient justification? What is socialization into this world comprised of, then, and what is the end result? By the time one is socialized, is there a ‘real’ self? • Could increased consumerism, item/ideological loyalty, and faith in society’s institutions be a matter of cognitive dissonance? Are floating signifiers even more powerful than their structured and centered predecessors? • Self and Personality as Simulation (a postmodern self?) • The self ‘no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational…. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models.’ (Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulations) • ‘By extinguishing its own foundational myth, the… [self] also eliminates its internal contradictions (no more reality and no referent with which to challenge it).’ (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death)