Social Judgement Theory
In the discourses of everyday human interaction, messages are crafted, communicated, received, and responded to. Social Judgement Theory argues that how the recipient of a message perceives and interprets a message, involves a process of judgment and effect that is based on the recipient’s ego (attitude) and anchoring position (opinion) about the topic. This process is key to the resulting assimilation, rejection, or persuasion of that message. Where does this theory come from and how does it work? This paper will explore how Social Judgement Theory was developed and is described, along with providing an evaluation and example of the theory in practice.
The Development
Background
Social Judgement Theory is a theory of persuasion and attitude change. It was developed by the work Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland in 1961. The central figure in the development of this theory was Muzafer Sherif. Originating from Turkey, he is considered one of the founders of social psychology. He is best known for his research on the autokinetic effect in the 1950’s, which describes the illusion that a small and stationary pinpoint of light in a dark room actually moves. Using this same effect, he applied it to the way we perceive messages and change our beliefs and positions over time.
Carl Hovland was considered an early communications theorist. He is best known for his work on attitudes and social communications. He was a former Yale University Professor and
Sussman 's article deals with the idea of framing the message that provides the perspective that we want others to adopt by presenting a rationale, and a sequential pattern for presenting the evidence for that position. The article draws from Aristotle 's traditional method of examining the ethos, pathos, and logos pattern of persuasion. Sussman provides for steps to framing a message which includes: determine your specific objective, conduct a swot analysis of the other party 's current status, determine the other party 's core values, and write a simple, vivid, evaluative statement linking the other three. The frame is important because it orients the receiver to examine the message with a certain disposition. The three goals of the frame that are to choose the evaluative theme that is believed to be the most credible or compelling. Next, decide on the evidence that supports that perspective, and create a structure that provides the perspective that we want the receiver to understand.
In this chapter Heinrichs discusses how a great rhetorician ought to decide the right medium, no longer just the proper time, to supply a positive message. (And certainly, most of the people do intuitively understand which media prefer which messages—as an instance, the majority understand that it’s a horrific concept to break up with someone over textual content). Heinrichs’ approach for evaluating exclusive styles of verbal exchange emphasizes the permanence, emotional characteristics, and immediacy of a medium. Some media allow the target audience to look the persuader’s appearance; others don’t. Some media transmit messages that remaining for all time; others don’t. With these styles of issues come critical choices about what content would play high-quality through every medium. As a result of their diverse bodily and temporal constraints, specific forms of communique favor one of kind varieties of messages. A message this is only heard once, for only a few seconds, might be much less emblems-centric than a message that stays for all time, and which requires a variety of time to study.
Society judges people based on matters predetermined by elements of their lifestyle. A demographic approach from birth to death greatly affects the outlook of the world and others on the planet. Understanding the refusal to accept others based on patriotism and ethnocentrism branches into our values and beliefs passing on to children and ultimately the world. The ignorance that fuels each side’s judgments. Western and Eastern worlds’ ignorance exhibit aspects of religion, culture, politics, and status. Disagreements between different peoples regarding religion, culture, politics, and social status will arise, as seen throughout history.
The elaboration likelihood model states that persuasion can be take two different routes, central or peripheral. The central route requires a person to think critically about the argument proposed, considering both its strengths and weaknesses, then to elaborate on relevant themes. Whereas, the peripheral route does refer to the attempts at persuasion, in which the change in attitude is a result associated with positive stimuli- popularity, an attractive model or a millionaire, which could be relevant to substance of the argument. Selling products by associating them with attractive models or either by promoting that the product will result in social benefits. This is the result of peripheral attitude change techniques. Chaiken’s (1995) study is closely linked to Petty and Capioppo (1986) distinction of the central and peripheral route of processing. Whereas, Chaiken (1995) identified that people systematically consider all aspects of a message given, or people can superficially rely on a heuristic such as thinking that either longer arguments or arguments including statistical figures/facts are more true. The study suggests that people are more likely to resort to heuristic processing if the have limited time in order to process the message or if they are in a positive mood. Differences between the elaboration likelihood model and the
Petty and Cacioppo’s theory of persuasion is one of the most highly studied theories, in 1986 they published an article, in which they posted that there are two routes through which persuasion can take place. One is when people have the motivation and the ability to carefully process and think about the air arguments within a counterattitudinal message, in which they use the central route of persuasion. Furthermore, when people process messages centrally, they then evaluate the arguments within the message-the logical factual to the extent that their cognitive responses-the thoughts they have about the arguments while reading the message- are positive. On the other hand, when individuals lack either the motivation or ability to carefully process and think about the arguments within a counterattitudinal message, they will use the peripheral route in order to persuade. When people process a message peripherally, instead of elaborating on the arguments within the message, they respond to cues that exist within the message- images or heuristics not directly relevant to the message that can persuade without requiring much thought. ( Credo Reference Collections. )
In today’s society more and more Americans are being judged based on their appearance and not their character. Furthermore it has been shown that Americans are the most ignorant out of all cultures. In addition to being called names and targeted by government officials has brought the prison system at an all-time high. Basically people are being judged in society without knowing the person's background or even a last name. Being brought up in a world where slavery was a past time traditions seems like nothing has changed in America. They say all Americans
“Life in society requires consensus as an indispensable conditions. But consensus, to be productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of his experience and insight. (…) We have found that tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably and well- meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern” (Salomon E. Asch “Opinion and Social Pressure” pp.730). The experiment has proven that we live in times where opinion become very subjective and can be easily modified. Social techniques are wildly used in marketing and sales or even by lobbyist in governmental decision making process. The uncertainty of people own senses, opinion or knowledge can be easily abused. Asch’s experiment implements how people believe in the obvious lies. It’s shows simple ways of influencing perception, judgment and action. Results of this experiment trigger a number of social and scientifically researches like study of Berns
As social beings, with each one of us connected to a whole network of other humans and their associated beliefs, opinions and traits practically every conscious second of the day, it is inevitable that we will be subject to external influences. These influences come in all shapes and forms from a whole multitude of sources, occurring both consciously and unconsciously, instantaneously or over a prolonged period of time, with the potential effect of these influences ranging from the immaterial to the life-changing. While our susceptibility to influence from the connected world around us can be hard to measure given our constant exposure to several different influences, social psychologists have been able to study the world of influence
The social judgement theory is a theory by Muzafer Sherif who was a social psychologist at the University of Oklahoma. Sherif theorized that When we receive new information, we internally compare it to our point current point of view to see where it should be placed on an attitude scale. He believed that on any given topic there is a scale that represents our attitude towards a subject. This includes our latitude of rejection, latitude of acceptance and latitude of noncommitment. The latitude of rejection is the viewpoints we are more likely to reject within the topic at hand, the lattitude of acceptance is the range of ideas that we find to be acceptable and the latitude of noncommitment cover the ideas where we are open to be swayed either way. If we are heavily biased one way or another, sherif indicates that we are liked ego-involved. Our
There is not one person on this planet that has not, at one point in their life, been judged unfairly; and even though many of us want to believe that we don't, we, personally, do our own fair share of judging others just as unfairly.
‘Instinctive judgment’ is the motivation of an action in response to external stimuli based on either behaviour, innateness, or impulsion without involving reason (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014). Although instinct is often associated with intuition, they are separate concepts because instinct is inherent while intuition is acquired; instinct is the inherent inclination to react to a situation due to an inherited configuration of thought while intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without thought. Therefore, to make an instinctive judgment is to make a decision based on your instinct. There are as many meanings to ‘check’ as there are for ‘instinctive judgment’, but in this essay ‘check’ means to verify as to correctness by stopping
In social psychology, the phrase person perception has historically referred to the perception of others that leads to judgments of traits and dispositions. Fritz Heider proposed that people can attribute the behaviors of others to factors that are internal (personality, dispositions, etc.) or external (situational constraints), but that people are prone to make internal attributions (Ickes, 2000). These basic observations affected decades of research and provided an important foundation for two related theories, in particular. Harold Kelley’s covariation model, for example, described how people discern the attitudes of others based on simple factors surrounding observed behaviors (Sadalla et al, 1994). Similarly, Edward E. Jones
The paper will focus on the application of the social learning theory through the use of video games that incorporate moral choices into their design. In this paper, I will first describe what the social learning theory is and its implications. I will discuss findings that pertain to the social learning theory and through violent television and operant conditioning from violent video games. I will also explore studies focusing on the impact of moral choices in video games on decision making and moral disengagement. From the data, I will determine my own hypothesis as well as a methodical experiment relevant to the focus of this paper.
There are many explanations for the origins of modern social psychology. It is therefore important to consider that social psychology cannot be traced back to one single source of origin (Burr, 2003). Hence, this is the reason why there are debates of what social psychology is. Allport (1985) described social psychology as the study an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours which are influenced by the actual, imagines, or implied presence of others. As seen from this definition there is a direct link between social science and the individual psychology (Sewell, 1989). Social psychology cannot be seen as a linear phenomenon. This is because social psychology has been derived from a combination of influences. The development of
Chapter three explains different theories that help us understand how we perceive, judge, explain, and our expectations matter of our social worlds. How we use our thinking and how it impacts the judgments we make. How our beliefs, attitudes, and values affects our roles and perceptions in the society. We perceive our social worlds on how people form impressions of and make inferences about other people. For instance, we interpret things differently saying someone is “okay” can be a good for one or bad for another.