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A STUDY OF ATTITUDES
ATTITUDES
An attitude is an overall evaluation about some aspect or phenomenon in the world. On a whole our attitude is our belief, feeling and behavior towards any particular object of our attention. In Social Psychology attitudes are defined as positive or negative evaluations of objects of thought and they generally consist of three elements:-
• The cognitive component that entails the thoughts and beliefs people hold about the subject matter.
• The affective component that entails all emotional feelings responses derived from association with the subject matter.
• The behavioral component which is the tendency to respond in a particular manner when exposed to the subject or stimulus
These attitudes are normally towards individual people, groups of people, institutions, products, social trends, consumer products, etc. all can be attitudinal objects. Such attitudes may be social conclusions and summary judgments that may either be for or against something. Our attitudes dictate both our over and covert behavior and in as much the same tone manage and influence our decision making. Attitudes contribute a large part to our social and individual mannerisms and relations since they are the primary driving force behind behavior.

HOW DO ATTITUDES INFLUENCE BEHAVIORS?
The manner in which one chooses to behave is dependent on their attitude towards any situation that they may find themselves in. If the general attitude towards the situation is negative, it is only natural that the individual’s response will as well be negative an unreceptive. However a different attitude will in turn garner a different response and action to the same given situation. This in its own sense magnifies the importance of attitudes in social behavior and relations. The relations and interactions between person within any given society, are always managed under the direct or indirect influence of the prevailing and predominant attitude at any given time.
Social order: The kind of attitude one has about any given group will in the same manner be the kind of overall assessment or decision that they make about that group. Attitudes may at times be positive for example having a positive attitude towards change, will allow an individual to be more flexible towards different settings and different persons. However rigidity acts as handcuffs to flexibility and enforces conformity amongst new comers in any community against their own will. This can be a double edged sword in decision making especially on the concerns of code of conduct and law and order.
Information processing: the manner in which information is processed and coded in the mind determines our memory uptake and retention. The significance of the attitude relation to the situation or information determines the process of memory activity. In this way information processing will largely be influenced in the same manner thus affecting the memory, encoding and application of this information. If it is close to the heart and important to individual they are unlikely to forget it easily because it is encoded differently through both the emotional and the learning channels of the neural pathways.
Validity and belief: if the person proffering information is not of high recognition we tend to give them little attention irrespective of their source of information. The attitude that one bears about an information giver tends to determine whether they will truly take what is being said seriously and put it into practice. This is derived from esteem issues which are dependent upon attitude towards an individual.
Motivation and goal setting: The manner in which we interpret a situation determines how we shall act towards it. If financial stress creates anger born of the shame of lacking, some individual may be motivated to work hard to ensure that they are never caught in that situation again. This may be because the area in which they sought help during strife caused them more embarrassment and shame than relief. However another individual in the same situation may find their stressful situation helpful in that it makes others more willing to help them financially. Their problems are solved easily, and in the process their attitude towards need is not a drive to succeed, but rather to look for the nearest target to manipulate and beg.
Attitude to life: ‘the plate with which your fed affects the attitude towards a meal’ the same applies to real life situations. If one is socialized in a generally negatively tuned family network, their whole attitude towards life’s situations will always be negative. A child of a mother with severe depression has already been predisposed to a negative view of life and will catastrophize any situation of risk because it is what they are used to.
Attitude and prejudice: If your original attitude towards a particular sex, tribe or race was negative, any future encounter or association with such persons will be prejudicial in nature. You will behave and respond negatively to that person not because they are necessarily bad but because it is what you are expecting in turn and as a result the reciprocal effect will cause your relationship to be marred. However if one is made aware maybe through sensitization or through a self awareness growth, then their attitude may change due to learning and experience.
Attitude and attraction: We can only allow ourselves to be attracted to what we are positively attuned to and the reverse is true. If it does not bode well with us mentally we cannot welcome it into the emotional realm of ourselves and this is a common rule in our relations and attractions to things or places.
THE FOMULATION OF ATTITUDES
The formation of any attitude begins early in a person’s socialisation process, it is ongoing and has no limitations other than death. However along the way experiences and information is given to the person that may strengthen or change these attitudes. Some resilient and long standing attitudes are formed due to psychological influences and these mainly through:
• Operant conditioning: This may be as a result of instrumental Conditioning through actions from experience. For example the result of interacting with violent boys, and a mother getting beaten by the father, this as a child forms a negative attitude towards men.
• Classical conditioning involves the involuntary responses of an individual acquired through the pairing of two stimuli. As such, with attitudes the association of a particular attitude to an attractive or positively viewed source like a group or person, may strengthen the attitude of a person. For example the attitude towards a behaviour that may have been imitated or seen in a celebrity. Or the attitude towards alcohol being derived from watching celebrities actively drinking that particular drink.
• Direct instruction: this tends to come from Thorndike’s of ‘law of effect’ which emphasises the likelihood of a behaviour being repeated if it is positively rewarded and the reverse if it is punished. This same logic strengthens the belief that people have and thus solidifies or erases particular attitudes.Thus, if one expresses, or acts out an attitude toward some group, and this is reinforced by one’s peers, the attitude is strengthened and is likely to be expressed again. The reinforcement can be as subtle as a smile or as obvious as a raise in salary. Operant conditioning is especially involved with the behavioral component of attitudes.
• Unconscious Motivation. Some attitudes are held because they serve some unconscious function for an individual. They may tend to develop as a form of self defense mechanism and the individual is not always aware of them. This may take on the form of joining the other side to protect the self like the ‘Stockholm syndrome’. The positive attitude towards a kidnapper may not be rational but may be a coping strategy of the individual involved.
• Social (Observational) Learning is based on modeling. According to the Social Learning Theory (Bandura 1977): Attitudes are learned through imitation and modelling. Parents and society influence attitude especially when they are either followed by approval or reprimand. An attitude is not formed if the parents are not moved either way to object or praise which creates less significance towards memory recall by the individual. The individual’ own experience determine show likely it is that they will adapt a particular attitude. If the experience of the object, situation of person was rewarding and worth their while, then the formed attitude is often times positive and lasting to the person.
• Cognitive Dissonance exists when related cognitions, feelings or behaviors are inconsistent or contradictory. Cognitive dissonance creates an unpleasant state of tension that motivates people to reduce their dissonance by changing their cognitions, feeling, or behaviors. For example, a young boy who starts out with a positive attitude towards alcohol will have a dissonance of sorts when they try it and do not enjoy the impact. The dissonance they experience is thus likely to motivate them to either change their attitude toward.
• Rational Analysis is born over time and tends to come from the individual strongly analyzing and studying something before forming an attitude towards it.

HOW TO HELP PERSON WITH NEGATIVE ATTITUDE TOWARDS OTHERS
Attitudes are ingrained and tend to have been established and strengthened in an individual over time, through experience and reaffirmation. As a result, it is not an overnight process to try and change the attitude of an individual especially the negative ones. In an attempt to help someone to deal with attitude change and especially negative attitude, I would endeavor to apply the the Yale Attitude Change Approach (Hovland, et al. 1953). According to this approach, attitude change/persuasion influenced by 3 factors:-
Source – the person or place from which the information to change is coming from.
The characteristics of the source of persuasion would have to be taken into account, meaning that I would make sure that the person doing the persuasion has:-
Credibility
expertise
Trustworthiness
Attractiveness
Similarity
Appearance
Message – features of communication itself have to be considered with serious consideration given to:-
Message Factors ie are they one sided or two sided and preferably two sided in this case.
Order of messages
Primacy Effects
Recency Effects
Repetition
Audience – characteristics of who is receiving the message would have to consider:
Distraction
Intelligence
Self-Esteem (?)
Age (18-25 year olds most susceptible)
Having taken all this in consideration I have to remember that there is no single theory that is totally exhaustive of any given challenge. So I would attempt to incorporate this information with another behavioural change theory namely Petty & Cacioppo’s (1986) Elaboration Likelihood (dual-process) Model of Persuasion (ELM). This theory states that ELM holds that there are two ‘routes’ to attitude change:
Central route to persuasion occurs when we think critically about message content and are swayed by the strength and quality of its arguments.
Peripheral route to persuasion occurs when we do not do much thinking but are swayed by employing heuristics on the basis of non-content cues (e.g., “experts know best”).
Depending on the kind of person that I am trying to help change, and taking into consideration the slight impression of their personality. I do believe a combination of these two theories would be helpful in enabling me to help them see a different view of what they originally see.

REFERENCES Bargh, J.A. (1997). The Automaticity of every day life. In R. S. Eyer, Jr. (Ed.), Advances in Social Cognition (Vol. 10, 1-61) Caccioppo, J. T. Petty, R, E., Lorsch, M. E, & Kim, H. S (1986). Electromyographic activity over facial muscle regions can differentiate the Valence & intensity of affective reactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 260- 268.
Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1998). Attitude Structure and Function. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed.) New York McGraw Hill. 269-322
Gerteis, J. R., & Savage, M. (1998). The Salience of Class in Britain and America: a Comparative analysis. British Journal of Sociology, 49, 252-274.
Hovland, C. & Weiss, W. (1951). The influence of Source credibility on communication effectiveness. Public opinion quarterly, 15, 637-650.
Lorsch, M., & Cacioppo, J. (1990). Cognitive Dissonance may enhance sympathetic tonis, but attitudes are changed to reduce negative effect rather than arousal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 289-304.
Petty, R. E., & Weigener, D. T. (1998) Attitude Change: Multiple roles for persuasion Variables. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology.
Kosslyn, S. M., & Rosenberg R. S. (2000). Social Psychology: meeting of the minds. In Psychology: the brain the person, the world. In the Brain

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