Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. Define attitude.
Answer: An attitude is a state of mind: a set of views about an attitude object, with an evaluative feature (positive/negative/neutral), an emotional component, and a tendency to act in a particular way.
Q. Name the three components of the A-B-C structure of an attitude.
Answer: Affective (emotional), Behavioural (tendency to act), and Cognitive (thought).
Q. Who proposed the balance concept of attitude change?
Answer: Fritz Heider.
Q. Who proposed the concept of cognitive dissonance?
Answer: Leon Festinger.
Q. Define discrimination.
Answer: Discrimination is the behavioural component of prejudice: behaving in a less positive way towards a target group compared to another, favoured group.
Q. What is a stereotype?
Answer: A stereotype is a cluster of ideas about a specific group’s characteristics, assumed to apply to every member of that group.
Q. Name any two sources of prejudice mentioned in the chapter.
Answer: Any two of: learning (which can also produce a ‘prejudiced personality’), strong social identity/ingroup bias, scapegoating, kernel of truth, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Q. What does the ‘centrality’ of an attitude mean?
Answer: Centrality refers to how much a particular attitude influences the other attitudes in the same attitude system.
Q. What turns a mere opinion into an attitude?
Answer: An opinion becomes an attitude when it also has an emotional component and a tendency to act, so that the person gets emotional if it is challenged.
Q. What is meant by ‘cognitive consistency’?
Answer: Cognitive consistency is the idea that the different parts of an attitude system must logically line up with each other; if they do not, the person feels real mental discomfort until something in the system changes. Both Heider’s balance concept and Festinger’s cognitive dissonance are examples of it.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Differentiate between a belief and a value.
Answer: A belief is the cognitive component of an attitude, the ground on which the attitude stands (e.g. belief in God). A value is an attitude/belief with a ‘should/ought’ aspect (e.g. one should be honest), and becomes an inseparable part of a person’s outlook, making it hard to change.
Q. Explain, with an example, the difference between valence and extremeness of an attitude.
Answer: Valence tells us whether an attitude is positive, negative, or neutral (e.g. a rating of 4 on a 5-point nuclear-research scale is positive). Extremeness tells us how far the attitude is from neutral (a rating of 1 is as extreme as a rating of 5, just in the opposite direction).
Q. What is scapegoating? Give the chapter’s own reasoning for why it happens.
Answer: Scapegoating is when a majority group blames a weak or small minority outgroup for its own social, economic, or political problems. It happens because the minority is too weak or too small to defend itself, and scapegoating becomes a group-based way of expressing frustration.
Q. Why does the $1 group in Box 6.2 experience cognitive dissonance but not the $20 group?
Answer: The $1 group had no strong external reason to have lied (‘I told a lie for only $1′), which clashed with ‘The experiment was very boring’, creating dissonance they reduced by deciding ‘The experiment was actually interesting’. The $20 group had an easy justification (‘I told a lie because I was paid $20′), so they felt no dissonance and rated the experiment as very boring.
Q. State any two conditions under which there is consistency between attitude and behaviour.
Answer: Any two of: the attitude is strong and central; the person is aware of their own attitude; there is little/no external pressure to behave otherwise; the behaviour is not watched/evaluated by others; the person believes the behaviour will have a positive consequence.
Q. What is the ‘kernel of truth’ concept of prejudice?
Answer: It is the idea that people continue to hold a stereotype because they believe there must be ‘some truth’ in what everyone says about the other group, and even a few examples are considered sufficient to support this ‘kernel of truth’ idea.
Q. Distinguish between congruent and incongruent attitude change with one example each.
Answer: Congruent change moves in the same direction as the existing attitude (e.g. a positive attitude to women’s empowerment becoming more positive after reading about a successful woman). Incongruent change moves in the opposite direction (e.g. the same positive attitude becoming less positive after worrying that women might ‘neglect family responsibilities’).
Q. Why is face-to-face communication usually more effective than mass media in changing an attitude? Give the chapter’s ORS example.
Answer: The chapter states that face-to-face transmission is usually more effective than indirect transmission such as letters, pamphlets or mass media; it does not give a separate reason. Its example: a positive attitude towards Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) is created more effectively when community social workers and doctors talk to people directly than when the same benefits are only described on the radio.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Explain the A-B-C components of an attitude using Box 6.1’s ‘Green Environment’ example.
Answer: In Box 6.1, a person’s positive view about a ‘green environment’, based on sufficient information, is the cognitive (C) component. Feeling happy seeing greenery, and sad or angry seeing trees cut down, is the affective (A) component. Actually joining a tree-plantation campaign is the behavioural (B) component. The three usually point the same way, but need not always be equally strong; the cognitive component can be strong while the affective/behavioural components stay only weakly positive, so predicting one from the other two does not always give the correct picture.
Q. Describe Heider’s balance concept using the P-O-X triangle and the dowry example given in the chapter.
Answer: The P-O-X triangle represents three relationships: P (the person whose attitude is studied), O (another person), and X (the attitude object). In the dowry example, P has a positive attitude to dowry (P-X: +), O has a positive attitude towards P (O-P: +), but O has a negative attitude to dowry (O-X: −). Two positive sides and one negative side is an imbalanced triangle, and since imbalance is logically uncomfortable, one of the three relationships must change: P may start disliking dowry, O may start liking it, or O may start disliking P.
Q. Explain the two-step concept of attitude change proposed by S.M. Mohsin, with the Preeti/sportsperson example.
Answer: In Step 1, the target (whose attitude is to change) identifies with the source (whose influence brings the change): the target likes and admires the source, and the source also has a positive attitude to the target. In Step 2, the source actually changes their own behaviour towards the attitude object; observing this, the target imitates the change. Example: Preeti likes a soft drink her favourite sportsperson advertises. If the sportsperson first shows positive feelings for her/his fans and then genuinely switches to a health drink (the source’s own behaviour change), Preeti, having identified with the sportsperson, is very likely to imitate this and stop the harmful drink.
Q. What is LaPiere’s study? What does it show about the relationship between attitude and behaviour?
Answer: Richard LaPiere sent a Chinese couple travelling across the US to stay in hotels; they were refused service only once. Sometime later, LaPiere sent questionnaires to managers of hotels and tourist homes in the same areas where the couple had travelled, asking if they would give Chinese guests accommodation, and a very large percentage said they would not. This negative attitude was inconsistent with the positive behaviour actually shown, suggesting that attitudes may not always predict actual behaviour.
Q. Explain the four factors that influence whether an attitude actually changes.
Answer: (1) Characteristics of the existing attitude: positive, less extreme, less central, and simple attitudes change more easily than negative, extreme, central, or complex ones. (2) Source characteristics: credibility and attractiveness of the message-giver. (3) Message characteristics: the right amount of information, rational vs emotional appeal, and face-to-face transmission being usually more effective than indirect transmission. (4) Target characteristics: persuasibility, strength of existing prejudices, self-esteem, and intelligence of the person whose attitude is being targeted.
Q. Discuss any four sources of prejudice named in the chapter.
Answer: Any four of: (1) Learning, prejudice learned via association, reward/punishment, modelling, group norms, and exposure to information, which may produce a ‘prejudiced personality’: low adjusting capacity, anxiety, hostility to the outgroup; (2) Strong social identity/ingroup bias, boosting one’s own group by holding negative attitudes to others; (3) Scapegoating, blaming a weak minority for the majority’s own problems; (4) Kernel of truth, believing stereotypes must have some truth; (5) Self-fulfilling prophecy, the target group may behave in ways that justify the prejudice, confirming the negative expectations.
Q. What strategies does the chapter suggest for handling prejudice? Explain the conditions under which increasing intergroup contact succeeds.
Answer: Effective strategies aim at: minimising opportunities to learn prejudices, changing existing prejudiced attitudes, de-emphasising narrow ingroup-based social identity, and discouraging self-fulfilling prophecy among prejudice’s victims. These are achieved through education/information dissemination, increasing intergroup contact, and highlighting individual identity over group identity. Intergroup contact succeeds only if: the two groups meet in a cooperative, not competitive, context; close interaction lets them know each other better; and the two groups are not different in power or status.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. Discuss the nature of an attitude: its definition, its A-B-C components, and the four properties (valence, extremeness, complexity, centrality) that describe it, using examples from the chapter.
Answer: An attitude is a state of mind about an attitude object, with an evaluative feature, an emotional component, and a tendency to act. It has three A-B-C components: Affective (emotional, e.g. feeling happy/sad about a green environment), Behavioural (tendency to act, e.g. joining a plantation drive), and Cognitive (thought/belief, e.g. one’s positive view of the environment). Four properties describe any attitude (the book illustrates valence and extremeness on a 5-point scale for nuclear research, and the other two with other examples): Valence (positive/negative/neutral, e.g. rating 4-5 is positive), Extremeness (distance from neutral, e.g. rating 1 is as extreme as rating 5), Simplicity or Complexity (how many member attitudes make up the system, e.g. health = complex, one person = simple), and Centrality (how much the attitude influences other attitudes, e.g. a negative attitude to military expenditure can be central within the attitude to world peace).
Q. Explain how attitudes are formed. Discuss the five learning mechanisms and the four contextual factors, each with the chapter’s own examples.
Answer: Attitudes are mostly learned. Five mechanisms: (1) association, liking a subject because of a liked teacher; (2) reward/punishment, a teenager praised for yoga may develop a positive attitude to it; (3) modelling, children observing parents respect elders, and being appreciated for it, may form a respectful attitude themselves; (4) group/cultural norms, offering money or flowers at a place of worship becomes normative behaviour; (5) exposure to information, reading the biography of a self-actualised person can build a positive attitude towards hard work, even without anyone else physically present. Four contextual factors: (1) Family and school environment, with parents and family playing a significant role in the early years and the school later; (2) Reference groups, especially at the start of adolescence; (3) Personal experiences, the army driver who, after narrowly surviving a mission, returned to his native village in Maharashtra and became a community leader; (4) Media-related influences, audio-visual media, the Internet, and textbooks, which can create both positive attitudes and unchecked consumerist ones.
Q. Explain the three concepts of attitude change discussed in the chapter, balance, cognitive dissonance, and the two-step concept, with a suitable example for each.
Answer: (a) Balance (Heider): the P-O-X triangle changes towards balance when imbalanced, e.g. the dowry example, where P-X and O-P are positive but O-X is negative, forcing one relationship to change. (b) Cognitive dissonance (Festinger): dissonant cognitions force a change to restore consonance; in Box 6.2, the $1 group reduced the dissonance between ‘The experiment was very boring’ and ‘I told a lie for only $1′ by deciding ‘The experiment was actually interesting’, while the $20 group felt no dissonance (‘I told a lie because I was paid $20′). (c) Two-step concept (Mohsin): the target first identifies with the source, then imitates the source’s actual behaviour change, as when Preeti, having identified with her favourite sportsperson, is likely to stop a harmful soft drink after the sportsperson genuinely switches to a health drink.
Q. What is prejudice? Explain its relationship with stereotype and discrimination, and discuss the strategies for handling it.
Answer: Prejudice is a usually-negative attitude towards a particular group, often based on a stereotype (a cluster of ideas about the group’s characteristics, assumed to apply to all its members), the cognitive component. The affective component is dislike or hatred; prejudice may also get translated into discrimination, the behavioural component (behaving less positively towards the target group). The genocide committed by the Nazis in Germany against Jewish people is an extreme example of how prejudice can lead to hatred, discrimination and mass killing. Prejudice can exist without discrimination and vice versa, but the two very often go together, and wherever both exist, conflict between groups is very likely to arise. Strategies for handling prejudice aim to minimise opportunities to learn prejudices, change existing prejudiced attitudes, de-emphasise narrow ingroup identity, and discourage self-fulfilling prophecy, achieved through education and information dissemination, increasing intergroup contact (only if cooperative, close, and equal-status), and highlighting individual over group identity.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark Which factor that provides context for attitude formation is most clearly illustrated by Meera’s mother repeatedly telling her ‘outside food is always dirty’?
Answer: Family and school environment, specifically the family, since Meera’s mother’s repeated statements shaped her attitude in this way. (Seeing her mother fall ill was also a direct experience, but the repeated telling points most clearly to the family.)
(B) 2 marks Identify and explain the A-B-C component shown by Meera getting ‘visibly upset’ when questioned about this habit.
Answer: This is the affective (emotional) component: her visible upset shows the emotional/feeling side of her attitude towards outside food, separate from her belief (cognitive) that it is dirty or her actual avoidance behaviour (behavioural).
(C) 4 marks Using the chapter’s own idea of centrality, would you expect Meera’s attitude towards outside food to be easy or difficult to change? Explain with reference to the chapter’s factors influencing attitude change.
Answer: Meera’s attitude appears strong, extreme (a firm dislike, not a mild preference), and likely central to how she thinks about food and health, given how upset she gets when questioned. Per the chapter, extreme and central attitudes are harder to change than mild, peripheral ones, so this attitude would likely be difficult to change, unless a credible source (e.g. a trusted doctor), a well-pitched message (for example, a rational appeal giving her information about choosing clean places to eat, or an emotional appeal about missing out on friends’ outings), or a strong personal counter-experience (safely eating out without falling ill) intervened.