4.2 Attitude Formation and Attitude Change

These three terms are linked but different. A stereotype is a generalized belief about a group of people ('Teenagers are reckless drivers'). Prejudice is an unjustified, usually negative attitude toward a group and its members, including feelings. Discrimination is unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its members, such as refusing to hire someone because of their age.

Stereotypes exist partly because they're mental shortcuts. Sorting people into categories reduces cognitive load, the amount of mental effort a judgment takes. The cost is that the shortcut often ignores individual differences. Stereotypes can be both a cause and a result of biased experiences: you notice examples that fit, which strengthens the stereotype, which shapes what you notice next.

Implicit attitudes are attitudes you hold without being aware of them, or that you wouldn't openly admit to. Researchers often study them with reaction-time tasks such as the Implicit Association Test, which measures how quickly people pair group labels with positive or negative words. Someone can sincerely reject prejudice and still show small automatic associations on such a task, and researchers continue to debate how well these scores predict real behavior.

• Just-world phenomenon: the belief that the world is fair, so people get what they deserve. It leads people to blame victims, such as assuming someone who is unemployed must be lazy.
• In-group bias: favoring the groups you belong to (your 'us'). Fans of one team rate their own players as more skilled and more sportsmanlike.
• Out-group homogeneity bias: seeing members of other groups as all alike ('they're all the same') while seeing your own group as varied.
• Ethnocentrism: judging other cultures by the standards of your own and seeing your own culture as the right or normal way.

Belief perseverance is clinging to a belief even after the evidence for it has been discredited. If you've decided a new classmate is unfriendly because they didn't say hello, you may keep believing it after you learn they hadn't seen you.

Belief perseverance is fed by confirmation bias, the tendency to look for and remember information that supports what you already believe and to ignore information that doesn't. One way to weaken it is to deliberately explain why the opposite belief might be true.

Cognitive dissonance, a theory from Leon Festinger, is the uncomfortable tension you feel when your actions and attitudes (or two of your attitudes) conflict. Because the discomfort is unpleasant, you're motivated to reduce it, either by changing the behavior or, very often, by changing the attitude to match what you've already done.

In a classic 1959 study by Festinger and Carlsmith, participants did a dull task and were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell the next person it was fun. Afterward, those paid $1 rated the task as more enjoyable than those paid $20. The $20 group had a good outside reason for lying, so they felt little dissonance. The $1 group didn't, so they reduced their discomfort by deciding the task really wasn't so bad.

Everyday example: someone who cares about health but vapes may quit (change the behavior) or may start telling themselves 'it's not as bad as smoking' (change the attitude).