Attitude

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Meaning of Attitude

Attitude refers to a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular object with some degree of favour or disfavour. "Object" includes people, things, events, and issues. Attitudes are the feelings and beliefs that determine the behaviour of the persons. They provide framework for responding in a particular fashion.

Attitudes may be positive or negative. Positive attitudes yield favourable behaviour and negative attitudes yield unfavourable behaviour. According to theorists, an attitude is "a relatively enduring organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols"

Components of Attitude

Rosenberg and Hovland have expressed the tripartite view and stated that an attitude contains cognitive, affective, and behavioural components

Every attitude has three components that are represented in what is called the ABC model of attitudes: A for affective, B for behavioral and C for cognitive. Although every attitude has these three components, any particular attitude can be based on one component more than another.

<ol>
<li style=”text-align:justify”>Cognitive component: The cognitive component of attitudes denotes to the beliefs, thoughts, and attributes that people would associate with an object. Many times a person's attitude might be based on the negative and positive attributes they associate with an object. When we form our opinion or judgment on the basis of available information and decide whether you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion on that, it is the cognitive part of an attitude we are talking about.</li>
<li style=”text-align:justify”>Affective component: The affective component of attitudes is related to feelings or emotions (e.g., fear, sympathy, hate, like, pleasure) of people linked to an attitude object. Affective responses influence attitudes in a number of ways. For example, many people are afraid /scared of spiders. So this negative affective response is likely to cause you to have a negative attitude towards spiders. Affect plays a very important role in attitude formation. Also, affect is a common component in attitude change. How we feel about an outcome may override purely cognitive rationales.</li>
<li>Behavioural component:  The behavioural component of attitudes refers to a tendency or a predisposition to act in a certain manner. The predisposition to behave in a certain manner may be caused by affective and cognitive components.</li>
</ol>

Attitude and Values

Attitude is all about whether you like or dislike something. Value is a belief (about what is important). Value can exist in itself. Attitudes are formed on the basis of underlying values.

Explicit and Implicit attitudes

Dimensions of attitudes

The structure of attitudes can be examined by exploring their STRENGTH, ACCESSIBILITY and AMBIVALANCE.

1) Attitude Strength

Attitudes differ in strength. Some attitudes are strong while some attitudes are weak. The strength with which an attitude is held is often a good predictor of behaviour. The stronger the attitude the more likely it should affect behaviour

2) Attitude Accessibility

Attitude accessibility refers to the ease with which attitudes can be retrieved from memory, in other words how readily available is an attitude about an object, issue, or situation. Attitudes that are more accessible from memory are more predictive of behaviour and are more stable across time

3) Attitude Ambivalence

Attitude ambivalence refers to the fact that our evaluations of objects, issues, events, or people are not always uniformly positive or negative; our evaluations are often mixed, consisting of both positive and negative reactions. In other words when we simultaneously possess both positive and negative attitudes toward the object in question we exhibit attitude ambivalence.

Attitude-Functions

<ul>
<li>Knowledge function: knowing one’s or other’s attitude imparts knowledge.</li>
<li>Ego-defensive function: attitudes can help people protect their self-esteem and avoid depression.</li>
<li>Ego-expressive function: used to express one’s core values or beliefs.</li>
<li>Instrumental function: helps to choose what is rewarding (and also avoid punishment).</li>
<li>Social Acceptance function: adapt to the socially approved attitudes of a larger group.</li>
</ul>

ETHICS CONCEPT SERIES by TIRTHANKAR ROYCHOWDHARY SIR | ETHICS CONCEPT SERIES – ARTICLE- III

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