NCERT Class 12 Psychology Attitude and Social Cognition

EXPLAINING SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR

Social behaviour is a necessary part of human life, and being social means much more than merely being in the company of others. You may recall from what you studied in Class XI that social psychology deals with all behaviour that takes place in the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Take this simple example: if you have to memorise a poem and recite it, you may have no problem in doing this when you are by yourself. But if you have to recite this poem to an audience, your performance might get influenced, because you are now in a social situation. Even imagining that people are listening to your recitation (although they may not be physically present) may change your performance. This is just one example that demonstrates how our social environment influences our thoughts, emotions and behaviour in complex ways. Social psychologists examine various forms of social behaviour, and try to explain their basis. Because of social influences, people form views, or attitudes about people, and about different issues in life, that exist in the form of behavioural tendencies. When we meet people, we make inferences about their personal qualities. This is called impression formation. We are also interested in why people behave in the ways they do — that is, we assign causes to the behaviour shown in specific social situations. This process is called attribution. Very often, impression formation and attributions are influenced by attitudes. These three processes are examples of mental activities related to the gathering and interpretation of information about the social world, collectively called social cognition. Moreover, social cognition is activated by cognitive units called schemas. Cognitive processes cannot be directly seen; they have to be inferred on the basis of externally shown behaviour. There are other examples of social influence that are in the form of observable behaviour. Two such examples are social facilitation/ inhibition, i.e. the improvement/decline in performance in the presence of others, and helping, or pro-social behaviour, i.e. responding to others who are in need or distress. In order to understand completely how the social context influences the individual, it is necessary to study both social-cognitive processes and social behaviour. Social psychologists have shown that one must go beyond common sense and folk wisdom in order to explain how people observe and make sense of their own and others’ diverse behaviours. Through systematic and objective observations, and by adopting scientific methods, it is possible to establish logical cause-and-effect relationships that explain social behaviour. This chapter will give an account of the fundamental aspects of the topics mentioned above. We will begin with a description of attitudes.

NATURE AND COMPONENTS OF ATTITUDES

For a few minutes quietly do the following mental exercise. Today, how many times did you tell yourself : “In my opinion…” or “Others may say so and so, but I feel…”? What you fill in the blanks are called opinions. Now continue the exercise : how important are these opinions to you? The topics of some of these opinions may be only moderately important to you; they are simply ways of thinking, and it does not matter much to you that others agree or disagree with your views. On the other hand, you may find that some other topics are extremely important to you. If someone opposes or challenges your views about these topics, you get emotional. You may have made some of these views part of your behaviour. In other words, if your views are not merely thoughts, but also have emotional and action components, then these views are more than ‘opinions’; they are examples of attitudes. All definitions of attitudes agree that an attitude is a state of the mind, a set of views, or thoughts, regarding some topic (called the ‘attitude object’), which have an evaluative feature (positive, negative or neutral quality). It is accompanied by an emotional component, and a tendency to act in a particular way with regard to the attitude object. The thought component is referred to as the cognitive aspect, the emotional component is known as the affective aspect, and the tendency to act is called the behavioural (or conative) aspect. Taken together, these three aspects have been referred to as the A-B-C components (Affective-Behavioural- Cognitive components) of attitude. Note that attitudes are themselves not behaviour, but they represent a tendency to behave or act in certain ways. They are part of cognition, along with an emotional component, and cannot be observed from outside. Box 6.1 presents an example of an attitude towards the environment, showing the relationship between the three components.

Summary

• Human beings have a need to interact with and relate to others, and to explain their own as well as others’ behaviour.

• People develop attitudes, or thoughts and behavioural tendencies, through learning processes, family and school influences, reference groups and the media. Attitudes have an affective, cognitive and behavioural component, and can be understood in terms of valence, extremeness, simplicity or complexity (multiplexity) and centrality. • Attitude change takes according to the balance concept, cognitive consonance and the two-step concept. Attitude change is affected by characteristics of the source, the target, and the message. Negative attitudes (prejudices) towards a group often create conflicts within a society, and are expressed through discrimination, but there are practical strategies for handling prejudice.

• The entire set of processes involved in understanding the social world around us is called social cognition, which is guided by mental structures known as social schemas. One kind of social schema, a stereotype, contains overgeneralised beliefs about a particular group, often leads to and strengthens prejudices.

• Impression formation takes place in a systematic way, and exhibits effects such as primacy and recency, and the halo effect.

• People also assign causes to their own and others’ behaviour, and to experiences such as success and failure, by attributing internal or external causes. Attribution shows effects such as the fundamental attribution error and actor-observer effect.

• Because of arousal and evaluation apprehension in the presence of others, performance of familiar tasks may improve (social facilitation) and performance of unfamiliar or new tasks may decline (social inhibition).

• People respond to others who are in need by helping them (pro-social behaviour),   but this is determined by several factors.

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