Attitudes

Attitude is a concept in psychology. Attitudes are positive or negative views of an "attitude object": i.e. a person, behaviour or event. People can also be "ambivalent" towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative attitude.

Attitudes come from judgements. Attitudes develop on the ABC model (affect, behavioral change and cognition). The affective response is a physiological response that expresses an individual's preference for an entity. The behavioral intention is a verbal indication of the intention of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity to form an attitude. Most attitudes in individuals are a result of social learning from the environment.

The link between attitude and behavior exists but depends on attitude specificity, attitude relevance, personality, social constraints and timing of measurement. Several things play a role for an attitude to cause a behavior. For example, a person may have a positive attitude towards blood donation but not go to a blood bank to donate blood.

Implicit and explicit attitudes

There is also considerable research on "implicit" attitudes, which are unconscious but which have effects (identified through sophisticated experiments using people's response times to stimuli). Implicit and "explicit" attitudes (i.e. ones people report when they ask themselves how much they like an object) seem to affect people's behaviour, 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.

Attitude formation

Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience. Tesser (1993) has argued that heredity variables may affect attitudes - but believes that may do so indirectly. For example, if one inherits the disposition to become an extrovert, this may affect one's attitude to certain styles of music. There are numerous theories of attitude formation and attitude change. These include:

Consistency theories, which imply that we must be consistent in our beliefs and values. The most famous example of such a theory is Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger, although there are others, such as the balance theory of Fritz Heider.
Self-perception theory, associated with Daryl Bem
Meta programs, associated with Neuro-linguistic programming
Persuasion
Elaboration Likelihood Model associated with Richard E. Pettyand the Systematic Heuristic Model of Shelley Chaiken.
Social judgment theory
Balance theory
Abundance theory

Attitude change

Attitudes can be changed through persuasion. The celebrated work of Carl Hovland, at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to advance knowledge of persuasion. In Hovland's view, we should understand attitude change as a response to communication. He and his colleagues did experimental research into the factors that can affect the persuasiveness of a message:-

Target Characteristics: These are characteristics that refer to the person who receives and processes a message. One such 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 attractiveness. The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a key variable here (Hovland & Weiss, 1951); if one reads a report on health and believes it comes 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 effect"). Whether there is a sleeper effect is controversial. Received 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, doctors and experts are used. In other cases film stars are used for their attractiveness.

Attitude in the workplace

When it comes to Human Resource Management and recruiting, in recent years hire for attitude became a well known mantra. Several commercial tests such as the LAB Profile, iWAM and PAPI were developed to measure work Attitude and motivation, e.g. for pre-employment testing.

References

[1] From USA Today "Power of a super attitude"

Attitudes

Contents

Implicit and explicit attitudes

Attitude formation

Attitude change

Attitude in the workplace

References

See also

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