The concept of attitude is not easier to digest considering its multiple explanations and approaches. Some define it as a ways of thinking and behaving; whereas others claim it as a state of mind and set of views about an object, person, or things. But, it is so important aspect of human personality. So, understanding attitude, its components and process of formation is indispensable.
Understanding Attitude: meaning, examples and importance
Attitude is an outcome while understanding about the social world around us. Simply, it is our tendency to evaluate something in a negative, positive or neutral ways. In the process of learning about social world, we tend to interpret objects, things or people in a specific ways. For example, it may be our feelings, views, or simply beliefs about things, objects or person in question.
Enthusiasm, tolerance, respect, gratitude are examples of positive attitude towards attitude objects. On the other hand, aggression, egotism, prejudice, resentment, arrogance are some examples of negative attitude. Neutral attitude doesn’t have any intense feelings.
It is so important in understanding social world as it is vital aspect of social cognition. You might be aware about social cognition. It is a mental exercise of gathering and interpretation of information about social world.
Besides, it plays vital role in the decision making and problem solving. Positive attitude like Resilience, open mindedness, tolerance, enthusiasm, etc. help to focus on exploring solutions, reduce stress, and maintain optimism.
Key components of attitude
As I explained before that attitude is our tendency to evaluate something in a negative, positive or neutral ways in the process of interpretating social world around us. We tend to evaluate attitude object in positive, negative or neutral ways. So, obviously, it can’t be possible without a thought process, like or dislike, reactions and belief system. So, there are three important components which make the attitude a reality are:
Cognitive components: thoughts, views
Subjective components: emotions, feelings
Behavioural components: tendencies to act
It is also called ABC model of components of attitude which includes affective, behavioural and cognitive aspects.
Affective and behavioural components of attitude
As the name implies affective components include emotions, feelings, all the reactions one have towards attitude objects. It includes both negative and positive feelings like love, joy, enthusiasm, courage, sadness, anxiety, worry, fear, hate likes, dislike, etc. Such feelings have strong bearing on the behaviour of person.
For example, if you feel positive and enthusiastic about celebration, you will eager to join and enjoy celebration let it be marriage, birthday or farewell. In this ways, your positive feelings impacted your tendency to act or behaviour. You can’t hold back participating activities you have positive feelings.
Conversely, if you have negative feelings about attitude objects, you tend to avoid it at any cost. If you fear of skating in snow, you tend to avoid it. You will not participate in skating.
Cognitive components of attitude
Your prior knowledge, past experiences, existing knowledge, your thoughts and views, memories, and other mental processes are part of cognitive components. Individuals use such components to interpret and evaluate the attitude objects like things, objects and person either negative or positive ways.
If you have positive views regarding organic food, you tend to eat more organic food avoiding chemical. In this ways, your views and thoughts affect your actions or behaviours. Naturally, your views and thoughts affect your feelings whether to like or dislike organic food.
If you like it, you tend to eat and cultivate more. And, if you dislike, you tend to avoid it. This is the pattern of cognitive, affective and behavioural components in the formation of attitude. By understanding components, one could easily predict the attitude and behaviour.
Processes of attitude formation
These are certain ways by which individual develops kind of attitude regarding attitude objects. Generally, attitude is formed by the process of association, rewards, punishments, and modelling. Let’s see one by one in detail.
In the behavioural learning theory, I have explained in detail about how things are learned by making association and employing reward and punishment through classical and oparant conditioning.
Learning by association means pairing a neutral stimuli with unconditioned stimuli or biologically potent stimuli to generate conditioned response. If a begar went to a temple and receive daily food, that person used to visit temple regularly on right time and develop positive attitude. Here, temple is a neutral stimuli and food is a unconditioned stimuli. And, specific time or announcement becomes learned response. The begar reaches there either on a specific time or announcement.
Same result we get when we employ rewards and punishments. It is called oparant conditioning. Obviously, we do less if ours acts are punished, but we do often if ours acts are rewarded.
Oparant conditioning is a learning method that employs rewards and punishment to alter the behaviour of persons or animals. Generally, we tend to avoid behaviour that we know will have negative consequences. So we form negative attitudes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_(psychology)