Attitude-types And Examples

Attitude refers to a psychological tendency to react positively or negatively to an object, person, place, event, issue, or piece of news. In other words, attitude is a state of mind that is expressed when assessing a specific entity with a degree of favour or disfavour.

 

•    People's behaviour toward socioeconomically, politically, and culturally significant objects, events, entities, institutions, or symbols is determined by their attitudes, which are a relatively long-lasting organisation of beliefs, feelings, and proclivities. 

 

•    Attitudes provide the framework for reacting in a specific way in a specific situation.

•    Positive or negative attitudes are possible. Acceptance/favourable behaviour is the result of positive attitudes, while non-acceptance/unfavourable behaviour is the result of negative attitudes.

 

•    At times, however, attitudes are neither positive nor negative, but rather mixed or ambiguous. The majority of contemporary attitudes perspectives recognise ambivalent or mixed attitudes, which means that people can have both positive and negative attitudes toward the same object at the same time. This has sparked debate over whether people can have multiple attitudes toward the same object.

 

•    Attitudes can be either concrete or abstract in nature. The study of attitudes is important in social psychology because it aids in the understanding, analysis, and prediction of human behaviour. Our attitudes influence everything we do: what we eat, how we vote, what we celebrate, how we earn, what sports we play, what movies we watch, and so on.

 

•    Rosenberg and Hovland took a tripartite approach, claiming that an attitude is made up of cognitive, affective, and behavioural components.

 

•    Every attitude is made up of three parts, which are represented by the ABC model of attitudes: A for affective, B for behavioural, and C for cognitive. 

 

•    Despite the fact that these three components are present in every attitude, any particular attitude can be based on one component more than the others.

 

1.    Cognitive component: It refers to the beliefs, thoughts, and attributes that people associate with a particular object. 

 

•    A person's attitude is frequently influenced by the negative and positive characteristics they associate with an object. 

 

•    It is the cognitive part of an attitude that we are talking about when we form our opinion or judgement based on available information and decide whether we have a favourable or unfavourable opinion on it.

 

2.    Affective component: The affective component of attitudes is linked to people's feelings or emotions (e.g., fear, sympathy, hate, like, and pleasure). 

 

•    Affective responses have a variety of effects on attitudes.

 

•    Many people, for example, are afraid of spiders. As a result of this negative affective response, you're likely to have a negative attitude toward spiders. 

 

•    Affect plays a crucial role in the formation of attitudes. 

 

•    Affect is also a common factor in changing one's mind. Purely cognitive rationales may be overridden by how we feel about a result.

 

3.    Behavioural component: A tendency or predisposition to act in a certain way is referred to as the behavioural (or conative) component of attitudes. 

 

o    Affective and cognitive factors may contribute to a person's proclivity to behave in a certain way.

 

1.    Explicit Attitude (Conscious) – A person's attitudes are explicit if he is aware of them and how they influence his behaviour. Explicit attitudes are consciously formed. The cognitive component is largely in charge of these. 

 

2.    Implicit Attitude (Sub-Conscious) – Implicit attitudes exist when a person is unaware of his or her attitudes (beliefs) and how they influence his or her behaviour. Subconsciously formed attitudes are referred to as implicit attitudes. Affective experiences have a big influence on these.

 

Note: Explicit Attitudes are attitudes that are formed consciously, are easy to self-report, and are at the conscious level. Implicit Attitudes, on the other hand, are unconscious attitudes that are formed involuntarily and are usually unknown to us.

 

With the help of the following example, let us try to understand the difference between explicit and implicit attitude.

 

1.    Assume you're out with your pals and you meet someone new. This new acquaintance is wearing a 'Blue and Gold' Mumbai Indians jersey, which happens to be your favourite IPL team. You decide you like this person and strike up a friendly conversation with them. You consciously noticed the jersey and determined that this is obviously someone with whom you would get along well from an attitude standpoint. Your attitude is formed on a conscious level; it was purposefully formed, and you can tell someone else about it.

 

2.    Consider the following scenario. You're having a good time with your pals. You notice a few strangers around you but don't interact with them. You converse with your friends but are extremely uneasy. Perhaps your friend will notice and inquire as to what's wrong. You, on the other hand, have no idea. It's possible that one of the strangers near you reminds you of someone from your past whom you despise in this scenario. It's your attitude toward this person that makes you feel uneasy. The attitude, on the other hand, is unconscious; it was formed involuntarily, and you have no idea it exists, so you can't tell anyone about it.

 

•    It is possible for an explicit attitude and an implicit attitude to contradict each other, and this is quite common. Consider William, a white middle-class American who genuinely believes that all races are equal and abhors any form of racial prejudice. This is William's stated position. 

 

•    He is well aware of his strong viewpoint and can easily communicate it to others. He is, however, completely unaware that whenever he is in the company of Afro-Americans (or Black Americans), he becomes nervous.

 

•    It's possible that some of these negative stereotypes influenced William without his knowledge if he grew up in a small town with strong negative stereotypes about Black people. He may have a subconscious belief that African-Americans are bad people. This is William's implicitly contradictory attitude. It was created inadvertently, and he is unaware of it.

 

Explicit Attitude	Implicit Attitude
Consciously and Deliber­ately formed	Develops Subconsciously
They are generally formed due to recent experiences	They are the result of old experiences
Explicit attitudes have a dominant cognitive com­ponent	Implicit attitudes are mainly driven by the Af­fective component
These can be expressed and shared easily (self-re­ported)	These exist mostly at a subconscious level and therefore sharing such attitudes is difficult

 

•    Because there is no exact scale for measuring attitudes, it is often difficult to do so. 

 

•    After all, attitudes are hypothetical constructs that are difficult to study empirically. Nonetheless, psychologists analyse attitudes using the explicit-implicit dichotomy.

 

•    Inquiring about someone's attitudes is probably the simplest way to learn about them. Attitudes, on the other hand, are linked to self-image and social acceptance (i.e. attitude functions). People's responses may be influenced by social desirability in order to maintain a positive self-image. 

 

•    They may not express their true feelings, but they will respond in a way that is socially acceptable.

 

•    Various methods of measuring attitudes have been developed in response to this problem. All of them, however, have limitations. 

 

•    Different measures, in particular, focus on different aspects of attitudes – cognitive, affective, and behavioural.

 

•    Self-reports or easily observed behaviours are commonly used in explicit measures. Bipolar scales (e.g., good-bad, favourable-unfavourable, support-oppose, etc.) are commonly used.

 

•    Because implicit measurements are not consciously directed and are assumed to be automatic, they may be more valid and reliable than explicit measurements (such as self-reports in which you can do manipulation in self-reporting). 

 

•    People can have implicit prejudicial attitudes while expressing explicit prejudice-free attitudes.

 

•    Implicit measures help account for these situations by examining attitudes that a person may be unaware of or unwilling to display. 

 

•    The more powerful an implicit attitude is, the more likely it is to manifest as an explicit attitude. Strong attitudes are stable and resistant to persuasion, making them useful for predicting behaviour.

 

Explore the structure of attitudes by looking at their STRENGTH, ACCESSIBILITY, and AMBIVALENCE.

 

•    The strength of attitudes varies. Some attitudes are positive, while others are negative.

 

•    The strength with which one holds an attitude is often a good predictor of subsequent behaviour. The more powerful the attitude, the more likely it is to influence behaviour.

 

•    The ease with which attitudes can be retrieved from memory, or how readily available an attitude is about an object, issue, or situation, is referred to as attitude accessibility.

 

•    Attitudes that are more easily accessed from memory are more predictive of behaviour and are more consistent over time.

 

•    Our evaluations of objects, issues, events, or people are not always uniformly positive or negative; our evaluations are frequently mixed, consisting of both positive and negative reactions. 

 

•    In other words, attitude ambivalence occurs when we have both positive and negative attitudes toward the object in question at the same time.