Cognitive Miser Theory Paper

“Implicit attitude is defined as unacknowledged attitudes external to a person’s awareness which nonetheless have measurable effects on people’s response times to stimulations” (Grinnell, 2009). This is a topic of importance on reading within the field of social psychology.

Stereotypes are present in everyday life and they affect how were perceive other groups or individuals. As most individuals are a member of one societal group or another, it would be beneficial to examine why stereotypes form, and why some are more common than others. The purpose of this study is to identify circumstances in which an illusory correlation will be formed and how that may lead to the formation of stereotypes. An illusory correlation is the existence of a relationship, when no relationship actually exists.

Patricia G. Devine (1989) argued that prejudice will continue to exist simultaneously with stereotypes and that stereotyping occurs automatically and inevitably. To prove this, Devine and her team conducted three studies to examine the automatic and controlled components of prejudice.

Cultural influence affects not only the formation of a stereotype, but also its acceptance. According to the tripartite model of attitudes, a stereotype is the cognitive component of prejudiced attitudes. Many contemporary theorists suggest prejudice is an inevitable consequence of the stereotyping process (Devine, 1989). This makes learning attitudes and stereotypes of social groups inevitable. There is strong evidence that stereotypes are established in children’s memories before they have the ability to use cognitive processing to accept or reject the stereotypes. In this developmental process, the stereotype is easier to access for the child than personal beliefs; therefore, the culture an individual lives in makes it impossible not to apply stereotypes in daily life (Devine, 1989).

The definition of prejudice may vary among the different psychologist but most will agree that prejudice has something to do with prejudgment, typically negative, about a group. (Fiskie, 1998; Jones, 1997; Nelson, 2002 ). According to Plous (2003), Prejudice is not exactly considered an opinion, but an attitude which includes feeling such as hating the group, rather than believing they’re bad. Within psychology, we can link prejudice with discrimination and stereotyping (Plous, 2003). Although each may go together, they can be done separately. Prejudice and discrimination are most likely absent in a positive stereo type (Plous, 2013). For example describing an ethnic group as “family oriented”. Stereo typing does little to no harm without discrimination or prejudice. A generalized form of prejudice may lack discrimination and stereo types, such as being against foreigners.

Regarding the film Zootopia, there are several social psychological concepts that were explained in the events. Throughout the film, subtle but offensive comments and actions are unintentionally and unconsciously directed toward the non-dominant group (predators) and the protagonist of the film, Judy Hopps, encounters those macroaggressions throughout the story. As the film progressed, the police force became increasingly fearful and pejorative of the predator group in the city, which drew similarities to the attitudes exhibited by law enforcement officers in American society. Attitudes provide an association between a concept and an evaluation, whether it is favorable or unfavorable, desirable or undesirable, positive or negative. In addition, attitudes can be classified as automatic or deliberate. In comparison to the reflective responses (also called explicit attitudes) that individuals exhibit, the (automatic) implicit attitudes are relatively inaccessible to control and conscious awareness.

The proposed study aims to investigate the relationship between implicit prejudices and their effect on perception and judgment of others. Individuals generally hold specific prejudices towards their ingroups and outgroups and these can be deliberately or subconsciously expressed through explicit or implicit attitudes, respectively. Learning more about the relationship between the subconscious prejudicial attitudes people hold and how these affect perceptions of others is important if a better understanding of intergroup relations is to be made. More specifically, and relevant to the study at hand, investigating implicit prejudices White individuals have and how these affect their

According to our textbook, clusters of beliefs, values and opinions form an individual’s attitude. Throughout our lifetime, these attitudes manifest in different intensities and form biases, stereotypes, prejudices and bigotries. Biases and stereotypes can be both negative and positive, but stereotypes are only formed against people; biases are formed against people, places and things. In contrast, prejudices and bigotries only represent negative attitudes and like the stereotypes they are only formed against people.

Stereotypes and negative attitudes concerning obese people have been found at both the implicit and explicit levels (Schwartz et al.,2005). Implicit attitudes are the attitudes that people unconsciously hold towards something. They are said to reflect thoughts and feelings that people are either unwilling or unable to report due to self presentation concerns or because they are unaware of the biases they have in the first place (Schwartz et al., 2005). Explicit attitudes are the attitudes that people consciously hold towards something and are obtained using self-report measures.

Devine (1989) argues that stereotypes are inevitable on the basis that stereotypes and prejudice coexist and that stereotyping occurs automatically. Devine attempts to prove this hypothesis in three experiments. Devine reasons that “as long as stereotypes exist, prejudice will follow.” This hypothesis is rooted in a correlation. Prejudice and stereotypes are related, however there is no clear evidence of causality; Knowledge of a stereotype does not mean an individual agrees with it.

Former research is an explicit indicator of how one's behavior can be a product of the situation that person is present in. Experiment one of "Automaticity of Social Behaviour: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action that trait concepts and stereotypes" by John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows of New York University provides an experiment analyzing that behaviour through an experiment which will form the basis of critique in this paper.

Implicit attitudes are unintentional and somewhat unconscious evaluations that are made, explicit attitudes are attitudes that we are fully conscious and aware of Rather than focus on the feelings and values of an attitude object Cognitive based attitudes focus on the beliefs held about the particular attributes of an attitude object (Crisp and Turner 2007). This type of attitude serves to help us quickly identify a positive or negative response on whether we want something or not (Crisp and Turner 2007). Behavioural based attitudes are primarily concerned with Daryl

Attitudes carry a huge weight in social psychology. In the past, the theory of attitudes was considered the most dominant study in social psychology (Allport, 1935). Throughout time, the term attitude has accumulated many definitions, a renowned definition being “a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols” (Hogg and Vaughan, 2014, p. 150). The focus on attitudes is so significant because the question of whether attitudes can predict behaviour has arisen time after time. If attitudes do predict behaviour, we can discover why people act in certain ways and, therefore, attempt to change negative behaviours. Over time, work has been carried out to determine to what extent attitudes predict behaviour.

The psychological concepts involved in this contemporary issue are implicit attitudes, obedience to authority, and dissonance reduction. Implicit attitudes are attitudes that are involuntary, unconscious, uncontrollable, and typically unknown to us. They differ from their counterpart explicit attitudes which are ones we

Attitudes refer to one’s evaluations of the social world: others, objects and ideas. These overall evaluations can be positive, negative, or neutral, vary in their extremity and be based on a variety of information (Tesser and Martin, 1996; Petty, Wheeler, and Tormala, 2003 ). A popular conceptualization of the attitude construct, the tripartite theory, holds that there are three primary types of information in which attitudes can be based (Breckler, 1984; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960; Zanna & Rempel, 1988) : cognitions or beliefs, affect or feelings and actions or behaviour. As defined by Richard Perloff, persuasion is the process which moulds and shapes attitudes. It is through persuasion that changes in attitudes can occur. The two methods