What Are Attitudes?

Attitudes

What are attitudes? How are they formed, measured and changed? What degree of influence do they exert on behavior? What important effects does prejudice have on attitudes, and how is prejudice caused? These are all questions that are central to the study of social psychology and, by reviewing the findings of psychological research into these areas, this essay will attempt to provide a balanced explanation of the topic.

The fundamental question of what attitudes are cannot be answered easily, as many psychologists offer differing definitions. These range from simply describing them as likes and dislikes, to the definition provided by Tiffin and McCormick, in Attitude and Motivation(1971), where they summarize attitudes as being, “a frame of reference that influences the individual’s views or opinions on various topics and situations, and influences their behavior.” It is widely accepted, however, that attitudes include both beliefs and values. Beliefs, although considered to be based on the knowledge gained about the world around us, can vary greatly in their importance and influence, and therefore ibn their resistance

to change. For instance, an individual’s belief in God is highly influential, not only on its own but also in its effect on many other beliefs held by the individual, whereas a belief that eating late at night may cause indigestion is far less central and influential in its effect. Beliefs, both major and minor, form the cognitive component of attitude structure.

Values are an ethical, cultural and social code which can also be either central or peripheral in their influence but, unlike with beliefs, values serve as a justification of an individual’s way of life and are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to change. Values form what is termed the affective component of attitude structure.

The third piece of the attitude jigsaw is the conative component and this is the behavior towards an object or situation which is either a direct result of an individual’s attitudes or, as shown by the study conducted by La Piere, the behavioral compromise that can be caused by a conflict of attitudes. Fishben and Ajzen (1975) believed that this resultant behavior could be more accurately predicted by means of an expectancy - value model, which takes into account the values that the individual will attach to a given situation plus their expected consequences of any specific