That is, people use the keys to their own behavior and external conditions to infer what their own internal states are (beliefs, attitudes, motives and feelings).
All this serves to understand the behaviour. It proposes that through interpersonal relations the attitudes of any subject are inferred, based on the observation of two elements: the behaviour itself (external and observable) and the environmental conditioning factors of the context. The theory states that when a cognitive dissonance occurs, or when we are not sure of our attitudes, we do not try to change the attitudes by the motivation of reducing our psychological discomfort, but rather we carry out a process of attribution on our own behavior. Past behaviour and environmental conditionsīem (1972) understands attitudes not as a factor that determines behaviour, but as the explanatory factor of past behaviour, and suggests that people develop attitudes as a function of their own behaviour and of the situations in which these take place, as we shall see below. Let’s look in detail at the two fundamental elements of Bem’s theory of self-perception. This happens because the internal signals (inspection) proposed by other theories (such as Festinger’s) are often weak, ambiguous or not interpretable. īem eliminates cognitive dissonance as an explanatory factor of behavior, and in contrast to Festinger, he states that subjects infer their attitudes from their past behavior in relevant or similar situations. Bem’s theory of self-perceptionĭaryl Bem was an American social psychologist who put forward the theory of self-perception (1965, 1972), and who tries to explain how we infer our attitudes from counter-attitudinal behaviour. What happens when we act against our attitudes or beliefs? A counter-attitudinal behaviour occurs, which causes a cognitive dissonance.Ĭognitive dissonance as posed by Leon Festinger consists of the internal tension or disharmony of the system of ideas, beliefs and emotions that a person perceives when he or she has two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or by a behavior that conflicts with his or her beliefs.įestinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that when cognitive dissonance appears, people tend to try to reduce that dissonance, for example by changing attitude, so that our beliefs, attitudes and behaviour are consistent with each other.īem’s theory of self-perception emerges as an alternative to that theory. Eagly and Chaiken (1993) define an attitude as a psychological tendency that involves the assessment of favourability or unfavourability towards an object.įor example, it would be the positive attitude towards older people, which predisposes to help these types of people on the street when they have a need. AttitudesĪttitudes are different dispositions to behave, that is, they guide our behavior. Let’s get to know some previous concepts in order to better understand Bem’s theory of self-perception. In this article we will know it in detail.
Furthermore, it has also been concerned with understanding how our attitudes are formed, and how these guide our behaviour.ĭaryl Bem’s theory of self-perception has tried to explain how people determine their attitudes to different situations and behaviours. Social psychology has always tried to understand people’s behaviour in social situations.
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