Attitude and Social Cognition

About this unit

Social psychology studies how people think about, feel about and behave towards others. This unit explains how we form impressions and make attributions about people, how attitudes are formed and changed, and why prejudice and discrimination arise and how they can be reduced. These ideas are useful for understanding classroom relationships, communal harmony and persuasion in daily life.

Key ideas

• Social cognition: schemas, prototypes and stereotypes guide how we process social information.
• Impression formation: primacy and recency effects, halo effect and central traits.
• Attribution: internal versus external causes; fundamental attribution error and the actor-observer effect.
• Attitudes have affective, behavioural and cognitive (A-B-C) components.
• Attitude change: balance, cognitive dissonance and the two-step concept; source, message and target factors.
• Prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination; strategies such as education and intergroup contact.

How to prepare

• Learn each concept with a daily-life example and be ready to identify it in a short case.
• Remember the names linked to theories: Heider (balance), Festinger (cognitive dissonance), S.M. Mohsin (two-step concept).
• Practise distinguishing prejudice (attitude) from discrimination (behaviour).