Essay about Implicit Attitude Formation Through Classical Conditioning

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.

Prejudice and Discrimination are an all to common part of our cognitive social being, but many social psychologists believe that it can be stopped, but only with the help of social conditioning.

Although classical conditioning is something that most people experience in a daily basis, it may also be the first thing someone remembers in a day. According to Olson and Hergenhahn (2009) classical conditioning is defined as a type of learning in which a neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response after being paired with a stimulus that naturally brings about that response. In this paper the subject is to describe the theory of classical conditioning as well as describing a scenario in which one could apply classical conditioning theory to, and bring forth the scenario by showing illustrations of how this could be used

Being of target of bias can affect socialization due to the negatives attitudes that it entails.

Knowledge of negative stereotypes can influence people’s performance. Stereotype threat creates extra performance pressure through apprehensiveness about conforming to negative stereotypes (Woolfolk &

Through the Social Learning Theory, one can absorb new behaviors from others or one can form attitudes toward something that can in turn influence behavior. The attitudes we acquire may sometimes be implicit or explicit and depending on the strength of these attitudes and environmental factors, behaviors may come about. If implicit attitudes are strong and an opposing explicit is weak, the behavior will portray the implicit attitude unconsciously.

Classical conditioning involves deciding whether positive or negative regard is felt towards an attitude object that has previously been associated with either a pleasurable or un-pleasurable event (Lord 1997).

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.

Moreover, although these findings were not consistent with earlier work into the theory of evaluative conditioning such as that shown by Chen et al. (2012) cited in Brace (2014, p.160) and Hollands et al. (2011) cited in The Open University (2014), many factors might be present into why this study did not

Dovidio, Gaertner & Kawakami (2002) found that a shorter timed response of implicit prejudice predicted spontaneous nonverbal behaviors, such that there was a negative bias from Whites towards Blacks, despite explicit self-report measures by Whites indicating a more positive bias. However, studies have shown that individuals can employ implicit motivational tactics to control these implicit attitudes to such an extent that these associations and negative biases are non-existent. Glaser & Knowles (2008) found that those who had an implicit motivation to control prejudice did not show an association between weapons with Blacks (as opposed to Whites) and the Shooter Bias—being more likely to “shoot” the Black individual quicker than the White individual. That is, participants were equally likely to “shoot” both White and Black individuals. It might be noteworthy then, to investigate the effect priming has on more specific stimuli such as names. Namely, this study aims to investigate how likely White individuals are to match stereotypically Black or White names to a description of an individual after having been primed with hostile versus non-hostile behavior, and whether differences in frequency of matching are seen in individuals showing high versus low implicit prejudice. Thus, it is proposed that priming individuals with images of stereotypes characteristic of Black individuals (such as hostility) will facilitate the activation of implicit prejudices—high or

Previous studies have found that implicit and explicit measures of attitudes are often uncorrelated. Implicit measures consistently show higher levels of negative bias towards fat people than explicit measures and seem to be more accurate predictors of biased behavior (Wang

Do attitudes predict behaviour? It is not easy to find the correct answer to this question. The relationship between attitudes and behaviour is one of the most controversial topics in social psychology. This essay explores whether attitudes can predict behaviours using two of theories of behaviour change: Cognitive Dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) and Self-Perception Theory (Bem, 1965, 1967).

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.

Classical conditioning is the theory that involves a subject learning a new behavior by the process of association. A naturally occuring stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus) is paired with a response (the unconditioned response). Then, a neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus) is paired with the unconditioned stimulus and eventually the conditioned stimulus produces the initial response of the unconditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus being present. The response, therefore, becomes the conditioned response. This study had a major influence on the psychological study of behaviorism. “Behaviorism is based on the assumption that learning occurs through interactions with the environment” (Cherry 1). Classical conditioning

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).