ATTITUDE
Introduction
Attitude refers to a learned tendency to evaluate things in a special ways which may include evaluation of people, issues, object, or event. The evaluation can be positive or negative and can be uncertain at times.
Researcher who took a more behavioural stance define attitude as predisposition to respond consistently in a positive or negative way to some person, object, or situation.
Psychologist are in a better position to meet the goals of psychology (describe, explain, predict and influence) when they know the attitude of people.
COMPONENT OF ATTITUDE
Attitude have been seen as having three dimensions which include A. Cognitive: this represents belief, thought and expectation held about the object of ones attitude. B. Affective or emotional: this reflects feelings or emotional reactions. And can also said to be part of an attitude encompassing how one feels about the object of one attitude. C. Behavioural: this is the predisposition towards actions based on a particular attitude or to act in a way that is relevant to ones attitude.
Let see how these three components works together. For example an attitude towards eating caterpillars is said to be unhealthy or likely to do you harm or at any rate the sort of things of things which will make you appear abnormal to others. The effective component will be feelings of disgust or nausea at the thought of eating the things and the behavioural component would be how likely you would be actually to eat caterpillars if someone asked you to or how likely you be to refuse to do it.

FORMS OF ATTITUDE
There are two forms of attitude including A. Explicit attitude: these are attitudes that we are consciously aware of and that clearly influence our behaviours and beliefs. B. Implicit attitude: these are attitude that are unconscious which also have an effect on our beliefs and behaviours. E.g. Norms.

FUNCTIONS OF ATTITUDE
According to Katz there four functions of attitude. 1. A Knowledge Function: attitude can give meaning to our experience. 2. An Adjective or utilitarian function: holding certain attitude may make us more socially acceptable and so held our social interaction. 3. A Value Expressive Function: allowing us to express what we experience as the more positive aspect of our own inner selves. 4. An Eco Defensive Function: allowing us to defend and protect our unconscious motive and ideas.

Smith, Burner and White suggested that one reason why attitude are of quite difficult to change might be because any given attitude can be serving anyone of these functions, or even a combination of two or three. As general rule they argued we try to understand the world better, and so we will be resistant to change because they are serving a personal function for us.
Smith, Burner and White also make us understand that people are more likely to change their attitude when they are feeling relaxed and secure, not when they are feeling under threat or attacked.

HOW ATTITUDE IS FORMED AND DEVELOPED 1. The learning theorist ,they focused on the external factor that helps the individual to form personal attitude: A. Social learning: we learn attitudes from being exposing to similar views on the part of others or due to direct personal experience or from observation. B. Operant condition: we learn attitude from being rewarded for expressing some attitudes. E.g. someone who is fund of drinking and has bad breath, when he talks and friends complain or chastise him and always hey ask him to live their presence; this negative feedback from those around will gradually cause him to stop drinking. C. Classical conditioning: attitude is also learned from making association between attitude object and positive or negative emotions. E.g. in TV commercial you see someone taking in a pk chewing gum, after chewing he/she had a good breath and people started to chase him/her. You will have an imaginary appealing that when you take in pk you will have a good breath; this causes you to develop positive association with the pk.

2. Cognitive theorist, they focus on the internal thought and reasoning of the individual. A. Daryl Bem’s (1972) Self- perception theory: it says that when people do not always know how they think or feel about an issue as a result of that they sometime infer their attitudes from observing their own behaviour. B. Cognitive consistency theory: according to this theory, people need to feel that their attitude matches or are in harmony with one another. C. Leon Festinger’s (1957) Cognitive dissonance theory: we feel tension when we notice that we have two or more inconsistent thought and we are then strongly motivated to make changes in our attitude restore the consistency.

CONDITONS UNDER WHICH ATTITDE GUIDES BEHAVIOUR

1. Pretty and Krosnick 1995, when the person attitude is strong. E.g. people who have a strong favourable attitude towards Mills will vote for him than those who have moderate favourable attitude towards him. 2. Fazio and Oers 1982, when a person shows a strong awareness of his or her attitudes, the person rehearses and practices them in public. 3. Davidson and Jacards 1990, when the attitude is relevant to the behaviour. E.g. one study found the general attitude towards birth control was virtually unrelated to the use of birth pills in the following two years. The more the relevant the attitude is to the behaviour, the better it will predict the behaviour. 4. Ample evidence exist that changes in behaviour sometimes precede changes in attitudes. (Bandura 1989). When an individual decides to stop drinking he develops a negative attitude towards it.
Why behaviour influence attitude
Social psychologist offered two explanation of why behaviour influences attitudes. 1. Carkenord and Bullington 1995, we have strong need for cognitive consistency. I.e. we change our attitude to make them more consistent with our behaviour. 2. Our attitudes are not completely clear to us, so we observe our own behaviour to make inferences about it to determine what our behaviour should be.

ATTITUDE CHANGE
Changing the attitude of an individual will base on communication techniques. Such communication techniques when designed by one source in a direct attempt to influence the attitude of another of another, is the method of persuasion.
Therefore persuasion is the direct attempt to influence the attitude of another through communication techniques.
The effectiveness of persuasion depends on the factors such as 1. Source of the message: if the communicator is knowledgeable and trustworthy, the audience is obviously more likely to be convinced. 2. Audience : the kind of people getting the message (old, adult or young ones) 3. The type of message that is been sent to a particular people. 4. The technology used to send the message across. T.V, radio, internet etc. 5. The model that is proposed to explain emotional and rational appeal is the elaborating likelihood model. A. The central route engages someone thoughtful. E.g. commercials. B. The peripheral route involves non message factor such as the source credibility and attractiveness or emotional appeals. It is effective when people are not paying close attention to what you are saying. (Lammers 2000)
In a nutshell, attitude may change because of intellectual re-evaluations, pressure. Whether a given message changes an attitude depend on the source of the message, the type of communication and the characteristics of the audience.

Reference * Psychology Essential 2 (John W. Santrock) * Essentials of Understanding psychology (Robert S. Feldman) * WIKIPEDIA