Attitude: Definition and Formation

 

Attitude is our assessment of ourselves, other people, ideas, and objects in our world.

Anastasi defined attitude as “A tendency to react favorably or unfavorably towards a designated class of stimuli, such as a national or racial group, a custom or an institution.”

According to N.L. Munn, “Attitudes are learned predispositions towards aspects of our environment. They may be positively or negatively directed towards certain people, services, or institutions.”

“Attitudes are an ‘individual’s enduring favorable or unfavorable evaluations, emotional feelings, and action tendencies toward some object or idea.” — David Krech, Richard S. Crutchfield, and Egerton L. Ballackey.

“Attitude can be described as a learned predisposition to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable manner for a given object.” — Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen.

“An attitude is a relatively enduring organization of beliefs around an object or situation predisposing one to respond in some preferential manner.” — Milton Rokeach.

An attitude is a tendency to respond positively or negatively toward a certain idea, person, object, or situation. Attitudes influence the way people view things before they’ve actually been exposed to them. 

The first way we can examine attitudes is through a “tripartite” model. It is often referred to as the ABC’s of attitudes and consists of three bases or components, affect, behaviour, and cognition.

ABCs (components) of attitude:

a.      Affective (feelings)  

The affective component is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude. It deals with feelings or emotions that are brought to the surface about something, such as fear or hate. For example, someone might have the attitude that they love all babies because they are cute or that they hate smoking because it harms health. Affective attitude is usually inexplainable, one may like ice cream just because they like its taste and everything.

b.     Behavioural (interactions)

The behaviour component of an attitude consists of a person’s tendencies to behave in a particular way toward an object. It refers to that part of attitude that reflects the intention of a person in the short-run or long run. Using the above example, the behavioural attitude may be ‘I cannot wait to kiss the baby,’ or ‘we better keep those smokers out of the library’, etc. One may like their neighbour mostly because of behaviour component of the attitude. Their neighbour always helped them and they returned their help.

c.      Cognitive (thoughts)

The cognitive component of attitudes refers to the beliefs, thoughts, and attributes that we would associate with an object. It is the opinion or belief segment of an attitude. It refers to that part of the attitude that is related to the general knowledge of a person. Typically, these come to light in generalities or stereotypes, such as ‘all babies are cute’, ‘smoking is harmful to health’, etc. When attitudes are guided by cognition, there’s always a reason involved. One may not like his air conditioner because of his feelings towards it but because the air conditioner helps him, it keeps him cold in hot summers.

Characteristics of Attitude are;

1.  Attitudes are the complex combination of things we call personality, beliefs, values, behaviors, and motivations.

2. It can fall anywhere along a continuum from very favorable to very unfavorable.

3. All people, irrespective of their status or intelligence, hold attitudes.

4. An attitude exists in every person’s mind. It helps to define our identity, guide our actions, and influence how we judge people.

5. Although the feeling and belief components of attitude are internal to a person, we can view a person’s attitude from their resulting behavior.

6. Attitude helps us define how we see situations and define how we behave toward the situation or object.

7. It provides us with internal cognitions, beliefs, and thoughts about people and objects.

8. It can also be explicit and implicit. Explicit attitude is those that we are consciously aware of an implicit attitude is unconscious but still affect our behaviors.

9. Attitudes cause us to behave in a particular way toward an object or person.

10. An attitude is a summary of a person’s experience; thus, an attitude is grounded in direct experience and predicts future behavior more accurately.

11. It includes certain aspects of the personality as interests, appreciation, and social conduct.

12. It indicates the total of a man’s inclinations and feelings.

13. An attitude is a point of view, substantiated or otherwise, true or false, which one holds towards an idea, object, or person.

14. It has aspects such as direction, intensity, generality, or specificity.

15. It refers to one’s readiness for doing Work.

16. It may be positive or negative and may be affected by age, position, and education.

 

Development and Formation of Attitude

 

1.     Observation: People learn attitudes by observing people around them. When someone you admire greatly espouses a particular attitude, you are more likely to develop the same beliefs. For example, children spend a great deal of time observing the attitudes of their parents and usually begin to demonstrate similar outlooks. Attitudes are also formed directly as a result of experience.

2.     Learning: Operant conditioning can be used to influence how attitudes develop. Imagine a young man who has just started smoking. Whenever he lights up a cigarette, people complain, chastise him, and ask him to leave their vicinity. This negative feedback from those around him eventually causes him to develop an unfavourable opinion of smoking and he decides to give up the habit. Similarly, consider how advertisers use classical conditioning to influence your attitude toward a particular product. In a television commercial, you see young, beautiful people having fun on a tropical beach while enjoying a sports drink. This attractive and appealing imagery causes you to develop a positive association with this particular beverage.

3.     Social learning: Social roles and social norms can have a strong influence on attitudes. Social roles relate to how people are expected to behave in a particular role or context. Social norms involve society's rules for what behaviours are considered appropriate.

4.     Group affiliation: A person is more likely to form attitudes similar to his/her group members.

5.     Cultural factors: Some attitudes come from our larger cultural belief system. We may come to hold certain attitudes because they validate our or our culture’s basic values. Many attitudes also come from religious or moral beliefs. For example, for many people their attitudes about abortion, birth control, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty follow from their moral or religious beliefs and are highly emotional issues for them.

6.     Sensory Reactions: Any direct experience with an object though seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching will lead to an immediate evaluative reaction. We are experts at knowing whether we find a certain sensory experience pleasant or unpleasant. For example, immediately upon tasting a new type of candy bar, you know whether you like it or not. This also applies to aesthetic experiences, such as admiring the colour or composition of an artwork. We form attitudes about objects immediately upon experiencing them.

7.     Cognition: The cognitive foundation of attitudes, what might be called beliefs, comes from direct experience with the world or through thinking about the world. Thinking about the world includes any kind of active information processing, such as deliberating, wondering, imagining, and reflecting, as well as through activities such as reading, writing, listening, and talking. If you believe that insects are dirty and disgusting, then you will probably have the attitude that insects are not food. However, if you read that locusts and other insects are happily eaten in some cultures, then you may come to believe that locusts may not be so bad. Your attitude here comes from thinking about the new facts you read.

8.     Behavioural aspect: Sometimes we form attitudes from our actions. This can happen if we do something before we have an attitude (e.g., going to an art opening of an unknown artist), when we are unsure of our attitudes (e.g., going with a friend to a political rally), or when we are not thinking about what we are doing (mindlessly singing along with a random station on the radio). That is, there are times when just going through the motions can cause us to form an attitude consistent with those actions. In the previous examples, people may come to hate the new artist, support free trade, or like classical music because their actions have led them to engage in these behaviours, which then led to the formation of an attitude.

9.     Exposure: When we see the same object or person over and over, we will generally form a positive attitude toward that object or person. This is true for an object or person we feel neutral or positive about, so long as we are not overexposed to it. For example, many popular styles of clothing seem bizarre at first, but then as we see more of them, we may come to accept and even like them.

10.  Stereotype: A stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. We also form attitudes based on stereotypes.