📍 Please read the student's post and the professor's response, then write 50-150 words answering the professor's question.

📎 Student post: The Role of Behavioral Factors on Attitudes

According to Bandura (1977), observational learning is a process of learning through watching others, retaining the information, and then later replicating the behaviors that were observed. For example, when someone we admire greatly espouses a particular attitude, we are more likely to develop the same beliefs as well. After reflecting on myself, I find that I hold a positive attitude toward the concept of ‘being a vegetarian’, and it is shaped through observational learning.

To me, the mere mention of the words ‘vegetarian’ will conjure up some ideas such as ‘fashion lifestyle’, ‘elegant’, ‘higher education levels', 'higher socioeconomic status’ and so on. I infer that this favorable attitude is developed through observational learning because many people that I admire are vegetarian. For instance, the two people I admire recently is Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins. Peter Singer is a moral philosopher and the founder of the concept of ‘effective altruism’; and Richard Dawkins is an ethologist, evolutionary biologist who wrote the book ‘The Selfish Gene’. I remembered that after reading their book, I hope to learn more about them so I started by researching online in order to gather more information. During the time, I found that they are both vegetarian, and Peter Singer is also an advocate of animal rights movement. At the moment, I even connected this information to the fact that lots of my favorite actress like Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Meghan Markle are also vegetarian. As far as my observation goes, my attitude for ‘being a vegetarian’ is shifted from a previous ambiguous attitude toward a more positive evaluation due to my admiration for them, .

As stated by Chaiken and Baldwin (1981), the external information is more influential than internal cues for those subjects with poorly defined attitudes. Only the attitude inferences of the subject with an ambiguous attitude would be strongly influenced by salient behavioral information. Indeed, I didn’t have any well-defined attitude toward ‘vegetarian’ in the young age, even sometimes I heard about the argument of being a vegetarian, it never influences me until I’ve learned about many people I admire are vegetation. It is clear that this attitude is developed by observing others behavior. One cultural socialization agents that may affect my attitude is media. Robust findings indicate that people learn from observing models on television and other media (Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Chavez & Angelillo, 2003). And I’ve developed this attitude through researching online such as reading the news report or their video clips.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bandura, A. Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through the imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575-582

Chaiken, S., & Baldwin, M. W. (1981). Affective-cognitive consistency and the effect of salient behavioral information on the self-perception of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(1), 1–12.

Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R. M., Correa-Chavez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003). Firsthand learning through intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 175–203.

📍 Question proposed by professor: (Please write a 50-150 words response to this question)

Keep in mind that self-perception theory is a different perspective on how we form attitudes when compared to ideas like social learning. According to Bem’s (1967) self-perception theory, we sometimes use our memory of our past behaviors to form attitudes about attitude objects. In some more recent extensions of Bem’s ideas, Goldstein and Cialdini (2007) demonstrate that we can even use the behavior of close others as indicative of our own attitudes. That is, when we feel a sense of shared identity with other people we may also incorporate their behaviors into our own attitudes towards attitude objects. What consequences might this realization have for your attitudes?

References

Bem, D. J. (1967). Self-Perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena. Psychological Review, 74(3), 183-200.

Goldstein, N. J., & Cialdini, R. B. (2007). The spyglass self: a model of vicarious self-perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(3), 402.