Lecture
People's beliefs, too, can be an object of psychological influence.
Beliefs – conscious, stable motives underlying people's activity, which usually have an ideological basis and are expressed in their actions, deeds and behaviour.
Every country cultivates enduring values: patriotism, peaceableness, trust in the leadership. Yet real life and relationships among people can change. Established beliefs are subject to fluctuation. Purposeful psychological influence from outside therefore helps to weaken them, neutralize them, and replace them with their opposites.
Stereotypes are likewise an object of psychological influence.
A stereotype – (from Greek stereos – solid, and typos ‑ imprint) – a relatively stable and simplified image of a person, group, event, phenomenon, etc., reflecting only some, and sometimes even objectively non-existent, features. The term was first introduced by the American journalist W. Lippmann in 1922.
Examples of stereotyping can be found in any typology of people across various spheres of life: in social and political life («leftists» and «rightists», «radicals» and «conservatives», «extremists» and «pragmatists»), at school and university («strong» and «weak» students), in astrology («Geminis», «Sagittarians», «Scorpios», etc.). Best known are ethnic stereotypes – images of typical representatives of particular nations endowed with fixed physical features and character traits (for example, the stereotypical image of the English as prim and thin, the French as frivolous, the Italians as eccentric). Occupational stereotypes are also very common – images of representatives of a given profession («all female teachers are moralizing», «all accountants – are pedants, etc.) Within every social group there are specific stereotypes shaped by the particular features of its members' activity and social roles. One variety of such stereotypes is the pedagogical stereotype of how a teacher perceives their pupils, based on a mental model of the ideal pupil that forms in the teacher's mind. Such a pupil confirms the teacher's success in their role and makes their job pleasant: cooperative, eager to learn, disciplined. Notably, the expectations that teachers form toward a child do in fact affect the child's real achievements. Stereotypes serve as a «coarse-tuning» instrument that lets a person «economize» psychological resources when perceiving, understanding and behaving toward other people. Stereotypes are characterized by:
emotionality;
generality;
superficiality of perception;
schematism.
Stereotypes arise in individual, group and public consciousness as a result of one's own experience and of perceiving the experience, opinions and judgments of other people. The mass media play an important role in the purposeful shaping of stereotypes.
Stereotypes most often manifest themselves under conditions of:
complex situations;
time pressure;
emotional arousal;
the presence of distracting objects.
It is possible to manage other people's stereotypes by creating the conditions listed above and depriving a person of the ability to control their own behaviour. Advertising often makes use of exactly this psychological mechanism of influence on people.
Purposeful psychological influence also targets attitudes. This mechanism has been the most thoroughly researched experimentally and is well described in contemporary social psychology.
An attitude – an unconscious state of a person's inner readiness for a specific manifestation of feelings, intellectual and volitional activity, a particular dynamic and manner of communication, and object-related practical activity, corresponding to the needs they have.
The structure of an attitude includes three components: cognitive (knowledge about the object of the attitude), affective (attitude toward the object of the attitude) and behavioural (behaviour in relation to the object of the attitude). The cognitive component of an attitude includes the beliefs, ideas and opinions — all the cognitions formed through knowledge of the social object. Affective reactions are the various emotions, feelings and experiences associated with the object of the attitude. The behavioural component of a social attitude is represented not only by actual behaviour (certain real actions already performed) but also by intentions (intents). Behavioural intentions can include various expectations, aspirations, plans and courses of action ‑ everything that a person merely intends to do. The attitude itself functions as a summary evaluation (an evaluative reaction) encompassing all of the components listed. It must be stressed that all the elements of an attitude's structure are interconnected and form a system of reactions specific to each particular person. A change in one component can therefore produce a change in another. Thus a change in cognitions may plausibly change a person's intentions or even their actual behaviour toward a given social object. This problem is addressed above all within such theoretical orientations as neobehaviourism and cognitivism (these will be examined in more detail in Topic 2).
A change in a social attitude can occur as a result of persuasive communication through a change in cognitions. For example, in the course of persuasive communication (via the mass media) a person's attitudes toward current events or historical facts, or attitudes toward well-known political figures, etc., can be changed.
One of the best-known lines of empirical research into attitude change by means of persuasive communication is the research, carried out in the 1950s at Yale University (USA) and associated with the names of C. Hovland and his colleagues I. Janis, H. Kelley, M. Sherif and others. Attitude change was studied using the principle of learning. Here the persuasive message was treated as a stimulus, and the resulting change in social attitude ‑ as an acquired response. A person's attitudes change depending on how reinforcement is arranged. By varying the system of rewards and punishments, one can influence the nature of a social attitude. The stability and «robustness» of an attitude change will also depend on how the information was processed, i.e. on the processes of attention, comprehension and acceptance.
The study of attitude change (of social attitudes) in social psychology is linked not only to theories of persuasive communication but also to the so-called theories of cognitive consistency, developed in the 1950s by F. Heider, T. Newcomb, L. Festinger, C. Osgood and P. Tannenbaum [cited in: Andreyeva, 2001]. This means that an attitude changes whenever an inconsistency arises in the individual's cognitive structure — for example, when a negative attitude toward some object collides with a positive attitude toward a person who gives that object a positive characterization. If a person's beliefs come into conflict, they begin to experience tension and discomfort. To relieve this unpleasant state, the person tries to establish consistent, tension-free relations between the cognitions by changing one of them.
The affective components are closely interconnected with the cognitive components in the structure of an attitude. One characteristic of attitudes is that they display a consistency between cognition and affect — that is, the so-called principle of mood congruence is at work [Andreyeva, Bogomolova, Petrovskaya, 2001]. In particular, this principle shows up in the fact that a positive affective state leads to more positive and optimistic social judgments, while, conversely, negative affects produce pessimistic thoughts. Creating a good mood promotes favourable judgments and activates positive attitudes toward other people and toward phenomena of reality. Another mechanism of attitude change through an effect on the affective sphere is the formation of associative links between the structural components of different attitudes. For example, if a highly respected television host (toward whom there is a positive attitude) is pleased to introduce a new person we do not yet know, a positive attitude toward the «newcomer» will be formed.
A person's own behaviour can influence their social attitudes, changing old ones or forming new ones. How this happens can be explained with the help of three theories – the theory of self-presentation and social dramaturgy, the theory of cognitive dissonance and the theory of self-perception [Myers, 1997].
Back in the 1950s, the social psychologist I. Janis undertook important research into how attitudes change under the influence of role performance. Behaviour originally required merely by a role very often becomes grounds for changing a person's beliefs and forming new attitudes. In real life, a person who changes their social status is often forced to change their attitudes in order to «support» the new role behaviour, so as to appear attractive both in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Playing someone else's role can help produce a more tolerant attitude toward an opposing point of view, since acting it out often requires a person to publicly defend an opinion they did not originally agree with. The capacity of role behaviour to bring about change, in particular in a person's attitudes, is actively used in role play — one of the basic methods of socio-psychological training. Role play, which requires a person to actively construct their role and to improvise, can change attitudes more effectively than the passive reception of persuasive messages. The influence of role behaviour on a person may be explained by the fact that, in the process of playing out and performing the role, there begins to operate self-persuasion. When a person becomes aware of their own thoughts and feelings, these become more significant, more relevant to them, and are better remembered [Zimbardo, Leippe, 2000].
Research into changes in social attitudes under the influence of behaviour, conducted within the framework of cognitive dissonance theory, revealed the effect of insufficient justification. «If a contradiction arises between what a person knows, and what they do, this contradiction tends to be explained away somehow, and most likely presented as a non-contradiction in order to restore a state of internal cognitive consistency» [Andreyeva, Bogomolova, Petrovskaya, 1978, p. 117]. A change in attitude as a means of reducing dissonance can occur, in particular, in cases where a person asserts something they themselves do not believe, or does something that contradicts moral norms or their self-image. Such actions can lead to changes in social attitudes, but only on condition that the person has no external justification for their behaviour and is forced to resort to internal justification (that is, to actually changing their attitudes).
However, there is another explanation for why behaviour determines a person's attitudes. One of the most influential conclusions was reached by D. Bem. He developed the theory of self-perception, posing the central question: how do people find out about their own attitudes and about the attitudes of other people? The theory held that people form judgments about their own attitudes, as well as about their own preferences and personal dispositions, by analysing their own behaviour — in exactly the same way as they would form similar judgments about other people, namely by observing their actions. The self-perception effect appears when a person lacks a clearly defined attitude regarding some issue, for example because they rarely encounter such phenomena or are dealing with something new. Observing their own behaviour then allows them to determine its cause, that is, to form the corresponding attitude. The process of self-perception, accompanied by the formation of attitudes, unfolds only when our attitudes are weak or not defined at all, and, moreover, only if there is no possibility of attributing the causes of one's own behaviour to some situational factor or external circumstance. In that case, in the course of self-attribution, a person begins to «become aware» of their attitudes in order to find the causes or meaning of their own behaviour. That is, the process of self-attribution in this case serves to explain to the person their own behaviour.
A characteristic feature of stereotypes and attitudes is that people are insufficiently aware of them. In order not to become the object of unwanted influence, a person needs to be aware of their own stereotypes and attitudes and to manage them. Constructive influence, moreover, can only be exerted by a person who is free of «personal» biases, dogmas, prejudices and stereotypes; who has no complexes of superiority, self-sufficiency or power; and who possesses a creative mind.
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