An
attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for something. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event— this is often referred to as the
attitude object. People can also be conflicted or ambivalent toward an object, meaning that they simultaneously possess both positive and negative attitudes toward the item in question.
Definitions of attitude
An attitude can be defined as a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, ideas, or just about anything in your environment (Zimbardo et al., 1999)
In the opinion of Bain (1927), an attitude is "the relatively stable over behavior of a person which affects his status." "Attitudes which are common to a group are thus social attitudes or `values' in the Thomasonian sense. The attitude is the status-fixing behavior. This differentiates it from habit and vegetative processes as such, and totally ignores the hypothetical 'subjective states' which have formerly been emphasized.
North (1932) has defined attitude as "the totality of those states that lead to or point toward some particular activity of the organism. The attitude is, therefore, the dynamic element in human behavior, the motive for activity."
For Lumley (1928) an attitude is "a susceptibility to certain kinds of stimuli and readiness to respond repeatedly in a given way—which are possible toward our world and the parts of it which impinge upon us."
Attitudes are judgments. They develop on the ABC model (
affectAffect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect" .The affective domain...
,
behaviorHuman behavior refers to the range of behaviors exhibited by humans and which are influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and/or genetics....
, and
cognitionIn science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
). The
affective response is an
emotionEmotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
al response that expresses an individual's degree of preference for an entity. The
behavioral intention is a verbal indication or typical behavioral tendency of an individual. The
cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity that constitutes an individual's beliefs about the object. Most attitudes are the result of either direct experience or
observational learningObservational learning is a type of learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and replicating novel behavior executed by others...
from the environment.
Making Social Decisions in Society
"Throughout this complicated modern life, we adapt our mode of living according to the social influences. A scientific attempt named game theory was utilized for the study of decision making in our daily social lives. This was thoroughly examined in specialized neurological labs. The above emphasizes the effect of various social interactions and the role of the brain in making decisions" (Rilling and Sanfey, pg.23-48).
Attitude formation
Unlike
personalityPersonality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and individual differences. Its areas of focus include:* Constructing a coherent picture of the individual and his or her major psychological processes...
, attitudes are expected to change as a function of
experienceExperience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event....
. Tesser (1993) has argued that hereditary variables may affect attitudes - but believes that they may do so indirectly. For example, consistency theories, which imply that we must be consistent in our beliefs and values. The most famous example of such a theory is
Dissonance-reductionCognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...
theory, associated with
Leon Festinger, although there are others, such as the
balance theoryBalance Theory is a motivational theory of attitude change proposed by Fritz Heider, which conceptualizes the consistency motive as a drive toward psychological balance...
.
Attitude change
Attitudes can be changed through persuasion and we should understand attitude change as a response to communication. Experimental research into the factors that can affect the persuasiveness of a message include
- Target Characteristics: These are characteristics that refer to the person who receives and processes a message. One such trait is intelligence - it seems that more intelligent people are less easily persuaded by one-sided messages. Another variable that has been studied in this category is self-esteem. Although it is sometimes thought that those higher in self-esteem are less easily persuaded, there is some evidence that the relationship between self-esteem and persuasibility is actually curvilinear, with people of moderate self-esteem being more easily persuaded than both those of high and low self-esteem levels (Rhodes & Woods, 1992). The mind frame and mood of the target also plays a role in this process.
- Source Characteristics: The major source characteristics are expertise, trustworthiness and interpersonal attraction
Interpersonal attraction is the attraction between people which leads to friendships and romantic relationships. Interpersonal attraction, the process, is distinct from perceptions of physical attractiveness which involves views of what is and is not considered beautiful or attractive.The study of...
or attractiveness. The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a key variable here; if one reads a report about health and believes it came from a professional medical journal, one may be more easily persuaded than if one believes it is from a popular newspaper. Some psychologists have debated whether this is a long-lasting effect and Hovland and Weiss (1951) found the effect of telling people that a message came from a credible source disappeared after several weeks (the so-called "sleeper effectThe sleeper effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby a highly persuasive message, paired with a discounting cue, causes an individual to be more persuaded by the message over time.-The sleeper effect:...
"). Whether there is a sleeper effect is controversial. Perceived wisdom is that if people are informed of the source of a message before hearing it, there is less likelihood of a sleeper effect than if they are told a message and then told its source.
- Message Characteristics: The nature of the message plays a role in persuasion. Sometimes presenting both sides of a story is useful to help change attitudes.
Cognitive Routes: A message can appeal to an individual's cognitive evaluation to help change an attitude. In the
central route to persuasion the individual is presented with the data and motivated to evaluate the data and arrive at an attitude changing conclusion. In the
peripheral route to attitude change, the individual is encouraged to not look at the content but at the source. This is commonly seen in modern advertisements that feature celebrities. In some cases, physician, doctors or experts are used. In other cases film stars are used for their attractiveness.
Emotion and attitude change
Emotion is a common component in
persuasionPersuasion is a form of social influence. It is the process of guiding or bringing oneself or another toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and symbolic means.- Methods :...
,
social influenceSocial influence occurs when an individual's thoughts, feelings or actions are affected by other people. Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing...
, and
attitude changeAttitudes are the evaluations and associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as an individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when...
. Much of attitude research emphasized the importance of affective or emotion components. Emotion works hand-in-hand with the cognitive process, or the way we think, about an issue or situation. Emotional appeals are commonly found in advertising, health campaigns and political messages. Recent examples include no-smoking health campaigns and political campaign advertising emphasizing the fear of terrorism. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of cognitive, affective and conative components. Attitudes are part of the brain’s associative networks, the spider-like structures residing in long term memory that consist of affective and cognitive nodes.
By activating an affective or emotion node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined. In primarily affective networks, it is more difficult to produce cognitive counterarguments in the resistance to persuasion and attitude change.
Affective forecasting, otherwise known as intuition or the prediction of emotion, also impacts attitude change. Research suggests that predicting emotions is an important component of decision making, in addition to the cognitive processes. How we feel about an outcome may override purely cognitive rationales.
In terms of research methodology, the challenge for researchers is measuring emotion and subsequent impacts on attitude. Since we cannot see into the brain, various models and measurement tools have been constructed to obtain emotion and attitude information. Measures may include the use of physiological cues like facial expressions, vocal changes, and other body rate measures. For instance, fear is associated with raised eyebrows, increased heart rate and increase body tension (Dillard, 1994). Other methods include concept or network mapping, and using primes or word cues.
Components of emotion appeals
Any discrete emotion can be used in a persuasive appeal; this may include jealousy, disgust, indignation, fear, blue, disturbed, haunted,and anger. Fear is one of the most studied emotional appeals in communication and social influence research.
Important consequences of fear appeals and other emotion appeals include the possibility of reactance which may lead to either message rejections or source rejection and the absence of attitude change. As the EPPM suggests, there is an optimal emotion level in motivating attitude change. If there is not enough motivation, an attitude will not change; if the emotional appeal is overdone, the motivation can be paralyzed thereby preventing attitude change.
Emotions perceived as negative or containing threat are often studied more than perceived positive emotions like humor. Though the inner-workings of humor are not agreed upon, humor appeals may work by creating incongruities in the mind. Recent research has looked at the impact of humor on the processing of political messages. While evidence is inconclusive, there appears to be potential for targeted attitude change is receivers with low political message involvement.
Important factors that influence the impact of emotion appeals include self efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features. Self efficacy is a perception of one’s own human agency; in other words, it is the perception of our own ability to deal with a situation. It is an important variable in emotion appeal messages because it dictates a person’s ability to deal with both the emotion and the situation. For example, if a person is not self-efficacious about their ability to impact the global environment, they are not likely to change their attitude or behavior about global warming.
Dillard (1994) suggests that message features such as source non-verbal communication, message content, and receiver differences can impact the emotion impact of fear appeals. The characteristics of a message are important because one message can elicit different levels of emotion for different people. Thus, in terms of emotion appeals messages, one size does not fit all.
Attitude accessibility refers to the activation of an attitude from memory in other words, how readily available is an attitude about an object, issue, or situation. Issue involvement is the relevance and salience of an issue or situation to an individual. Issue involvement has been correlated with both attitude access and attitude strength. Past studies conclude accessible attitudes are more resistant to change
Implicit and explicit attitudes
There is also considerable research on
implicit attitudesThe Implicit Association Test is a measure within social psychology designed to detect the strength of a person's automatic association between mental representations of objects in memory. The IAT was introduced in the scientific literature in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald, Debbie McGee, and Jordan...
, which are generally unacknowledged or outside of awareness, but have effects that are measurable through sophisticated methods using people's response times to stimuli. Implicit and explicit attitudes seem to affect people's behavior, though in different ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases they are. The relationship between them is poorly understood.
Jung's definition
Attitude is one of
Jung'sCarl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...
57 definitions in Chapter XI of
Psychological TypesPsychological Types is the title of the sixth volume in the Princeton / Bollingen edition of the Collected Works of Carl Jung. The original German language edition, "Psychologische Typen", was first published by Rascher Verlag, Zurich in 1921....
. Jung's definition of attitude is a "readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way" (Jung, [1921] 1971:par. 687). Attitudes very often come in pairs, one conscious and the other unconscious. Within this broad definition Jung defines several attitudes.
The main (but not only) attitude dualities that Jung defines are the following.
- Consciousness and the unconscious. The "presence of two attitudes is extremely frequent, one conscious and the other unconscious. This means that consciousness has a constellation of contents different from that of the unconscious, a duality particularly evident in neurosis
Jung's theory of neurosis is based on the premise of a self-regulating psyche composed of tensions between opposing attitudes of the ego and the unconscious. A neurosis is a significant unresolved tension between these contending attitudes. Each neurosis is unique, and different things work in...
" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 687).
- Extraversion and introversion. This pair is so elementary to Jung's theory of types that he labeled them the "attitude-types".
- Rational and irrational attitudes. "I conceive reason as an attitude" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 785).
- The rational attitude subdivides into the thinking and feeling psychological functions, each with its attitude.
- The irrational attitude subdivides into the sensing and intuition psychological functions, each with its attitude. "There is thus a typical thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuitive attitude" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 691).
- Individual and social attitudes. Many of the latter are "isms".
In addition, Jung discusses the abstract attitude. “When I take an abstract attitude...” (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 679).
AbstractionAbstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
is contrasted with
concretismConcretism may refer to one of the following*Concrete art, a form of abstractionism*Concrete poetry*Reism, a philosophical movement*concretism , an opposite of abstraction, see Attitude_*Reification...
. “CONCRETISM. By this I mean a peculiarity of thinking and feeling which is the antithesis of abstraction” (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 696).
For example: "I hate his attitude for being Sarcastic."
MBTI definition
The MBTI write-ups limit the use of "attitude" to the extraversion-introversion (EI) and judging-perceiving (JP) indexes.
The above MBTI Manual state ment, is restricted to EI," is directly contradicted by Jung's statement above that there is "a typical thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuitive attitude" and by his other uses of the term "attitude". Regardless of whether the MBTI simplification (or oversimplification) of Jung can be attributed to Myers,
Gifts Differing refers only to the "EI preference", consistently avoiding the label "attitude". Regarding the JP index, in
Gifts Differing Myers does use the terms "the
perceptive attitude and the
judging attitude" (Myers, 1980:8). The JP index corresponds to the irrational and rational attitudes Jung describes, except that the MBTI focuses on the preferred orientation in the outer world in order to identify the function hierarchy. To be consistent with Jung, it can be noted that a rational extraverted preference is accompanied by an irrational introverted preference. By Mr. M Amir Shehzad
See also
- Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...
- Elaboration likelihood model
The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion is a model of how attitudes are formed and changed that was developed by R. E. Petty and J. T. Cacioppo in the early 1980s . Central to this model is the "elaboration continuum", which ranges from low elaboration to high elaboration...
- Propositional attitude
A propositional attitude is a relational mental state connecting a person to a proposition. They are often assumed to be the simplest components of thought and can express meanings or content that can be true or false...
- Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
- Teenage rebellion
As part of their development into young adults, humans must develop an identity independent from their parents or family and a capacity for independent decision-making. They may experiment with different roles, behaviours, and ideologies as part of their process of developing an identity...
- Theory of reasoned action
The theory of reasoned action , developed by Martin Fishbein and , derived from previous research that started out as the theory of attitude, which led to the study of attitude and behavior...
- Theory of planned behaviour
- Expectancy-value theory
Expectancy-value theory was originally created in order to explain and predict individual's attitudes toward objects and actions. Originally the work of psychologist Martin Fishbein, the theory states that attitudes are developed and modified based on assessments about beliefs and values...
- Attitude polarization
Attitude polarization, also known as belief polarization, is a phenomenon in which a disagreement becomes more extreme as the different parties consider evidence on the issue. It is one of the effects of confirmation bias: the tendency of people to search for and interpret evidence selectively, to...
Further reading
- http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-10-12-mind-body_x.htm From USA Today "Power of a super attitude"
- "The A-Word" by Paul Niquette
- Anderson, J. R. (1983) 'A spreading activation theory of memory', Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 261-295
- Bandura, A. (1982). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American Psychologist, 37, 122-147.
- Breckler, S. J., & Wiggins, E. C. (1992). On defining attitude and attitude theory: Once more with feeling. In A. R. Pratkanis, S. J. Breckler, & A. C. Greenwald (Eds.), Attitude structure and function. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. pp. 407–427
- Chaiken, S., Liberman, A., & Eagly, A. H. (1989). Heuristic and systematic information processing within and beyond the persuasion context. In J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh. (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp. 212–252). New York: Guilford
- Dillard, J. (1994). Rethinking the study of fear appeals: An emotional perspective. Communication Theory, 4, 295-323
- Eagly, A., & Chaiken, S. (1995). Attitude strength, attitude structure and resistance to change. In R. Petty and J. Kosnik (Eds.), Attitude Strength. (pp. 413–432). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Fazio, R. H. (1986). How do attitudes guide behavior? In R. M. Sorrentino & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), The handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior (pp 204–243). New York: Guilford Press.
- Fazio, R., & Williams, C. (1986). Attitude accessibility as a moderator of attitude-perception and attitude-behavior relation: An investigation of the 1984 presidential election. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 505-514.
- Higgins, E. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience. In E. T. Higgins, & A. W. Kruganski (Eds.), Social Psychology, Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133–168). New York:Guilford Press.
- Jung, C.G. (1966). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Collected Works, Volume 7, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01782-4.
- Jung, C.G. [1921] (1971). Psychological Types, Collected Works, Volume 6, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01813-8.
- Loewenstein, G. (2007). Affect regulation and affective forecasting. In Gross, J. J. (Ed.) Handbook of Emotion Regulation (pp. 180–203). New York: Guilford.
- Maase, S. W., Fink, E. L., and Kaplowitz, S. A. (1984). Incongruity in humor: The cognitive dynamics. Communication Yearbook, 8, 80-105.
- Myers, I. B.
Isabel Briggs Myers was an American psychological theorist. She was co-creator, with her mother, of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ....
& Myers, P. B. (1980), ' to the development and use of the Myers-Briggs type indicator", Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. ISBN 0-89106-027-8
- Nabi, R. L., Moyer-Guse, E., & Byrne, S. (2007). All joking aside: A serious investigation into the persuasive effect of funny social issue messages. Communication Monographs, 74, 29-54
- Petty, R., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol 19, pp. 123–205). New York: Academic Press.
- Rilling, K. James and Sanfey, G. Alan,(January 2011), "The Neuroscience of Social Decision-Making", Annual Review of Psychology,62. pg. 23-48.
- Shavelson, R. J., & Stanton, G. C. (1975). Construct validation: Methodology and application to three measures of cognitive structure. Journal of Educational Measurement, 12, 67-85.
- Tesser, A. (1993) On the importance of heritability in psychological research: The case of attitudes. Psychological Review, 100, 129-142.
- Witte, K. (1992). Putting the fear back into fear appeals: The extended parallel process model. Communication Monographs, 59, 329-349
- Zaichkowsky, J. L. (1985). Measuring the involvement construct. The Journal of Consumer Research, 12(3), 341-352.