How many attitudes

Your attitude toward your toothbrush, on the other hand, is probably more cognitive you understand the importance of its function. Still other of your attitudes may be based more on behavior.

For example, your attitude toward note-taking during lectures probably depends, at least in part, on whether or not you regularly take notes.

Different people may hold attitudes toward the same attitude object for different reasons. For example, some people vote for politicians because they like their policies, whereas others vote for or against politicians because they just like or dislike their public persona. Although you might think that cognition would be more important in this regard, political scientists have shown that many voting decisions are made primarily on the basis of affect.

Human beings hold attitudes because they are useful. You can imagine that making quick decisions about what to avoid or approach has had substantial value in our evolutionary experience. For example:. Attitudes are frequently assessed using self-report measures, but they can also be assessed more indirectly using measures of arousal and facial expressions Mendes, as well as implicit measures of cognition, such as the Implicit Association Test IAT.

Attitudes can also be seen in the brain by using neuroimaging techniques. Some attitudes are more important than others because they are more useful to us and thus have more impact on our daily lives. Some of our attitudes are strong attitudes, in the sense that we find them important, hold them with confidence, do not change them very much, and use them frequently to guide our actions. Other attitudes are weaker and have little influence on our actions.

The researchers also found that these attitudes were very weak. Strong attitudes are more cognitively accessible—they come to mind quickly, regularly, and easily. We can easily measure attitude strength by assessing how quickly our attitudes are activated when we are exposed to the attitude object.

If we can state our attitude quickly, without much thought, then it is a strong one. If we are unsure about our attitude and need to think about it for a while before stating our opinion, the attitude is weak.

Attitudes become stronger when we have direct positive or negative experiences with the attitude object, and particularly if those experiences have been in strong positive or negative contexts.

Although the people who watched ended up either liking or disliking the puzzles as much as the people who actually worked on them, Fazio found that attitudes, as assessed by reaction time measures, were stronger in the sense of being expressed quickly for the people who had directly experienced the puzzles.

Because attitude strength is determined by cognitive accessibility, it is possible to make attitudes stronger by increasing the accessibility of the attitude. This can be done directly by having people think about, express, or discuss their attitudes with others.

Because attitudes are linked to the self-concept, they also become stronger when they are activated along with the self-concept. Attitudes are also stronger when the ABCs of affect, behavior, and cognition all align. They have strong positive feelings about their country, many positive thoughts about it, and tend to engage in behaviors that support it.

Your cognitions toward physical exercise may be positive—you believe that regular physical activity is good for your health. On the other hand, your affect may be negative—you may resist exercising because you prefer to engage in tasks that provide more immediate rewards. Consequently, you may not exercise as often as you believe you ought to. These inconsistencies among the components of your attitude make it less strong than it would be if all the components lined up together.

Social psychologists as well as advertisers, marketers, and politicians are particularly interested in the behavioral aspect of attitudes. Because it is normal that the ABCs of our attitudes are at least somewhat consistent, our behavior tends to follow from our affect and cognition. Furthermore, if I can do something to make your thoughts or feelings toward French toast more positive, then your likelihood of ordering it for breakfast will also increase. The principle of attitude consistency that for any given attitude object, the ABCs of affect, behavior, and cognition are normally in line with each other thus predicts that our attitudes for instance, as measured via a self-report measure are likely to guide behavior.

However, our attitudes are not the only factor that influence our decision to act. These three factors jointly predict our intention to perform the behavior, which in turn predicts our actual behavior Figure 4. To illustrate, imagine for a moment that your friend Sharina is trying to decide whether to recycle her used laptop batteries or just throw them away.

We know that her attitude toward recycling is positive—she thinks she should do it—but we also know that recycling takes work. But if Sharina feels strongly about the importance of recycling, if her family and friends are also in favor of recycling, and if she has easy access to a battery recycling facility, then she will develop a strong intention to perform the behavior and likely follow through on it.

Since it was first proposed, the theory of planned behavior has grown to become an extremely influential model for predicting human social behavior. More generally, research has also discovered that attitudes predict behaviors well only under certain conditions and for some people. These include:. The extent of the match between the social situations in which the attitudes are expressed and the behaviors are engaged in is important; there is a greater attitude-behavior correlation when the social situations match.

Imagine for a minute the case of Magritte, a year-old high school student. Magritte tells her parents that she hates the idea of smoking cigarettes. The relevant social norms are of course much different in the two situations. Behaviors are more likely to be consistent with attitudes when the social situation in which the behavior occurs is similar to the situation in which the attitude is expressed Ajzen, ; LaPiere, Another variable that has an important influence on attitude-behavior consistency is the current cognitive accessibility of the underlying affective and cognitive components of the attitude.

For example, if we assess the attitude in a situation in which people are thinking primarily about the attitude object in cognitive terms, and yet the behavior is performed in a situation in which the affective components of the attitude are more accessible, then the attitude-behavior relationship will be weak.

Wilson and Schooler showed a similar type of effect by first choosing attitudes that they expected would be primarily determined by affect—attitudes toward five different types of strawberry jam.

They asked a sample of college students to taste each of the jams. While they were tasting, one-half of the participants were instructed to think about the cognitive aspects of their attitudes to these jams—that is, to focus on the reasons they held their attitudes—whereas the other half of the participants were not given these instructions.

Then all the students completed measures of their attitudes toward each of the jams. Wilson and his colleagues then assessed the extent to which the attitudes expressed by the students correlated with taste ratings of the five jams as indicated by experts at Consumer Reports. They found that the attitudes expressed by the students correlated significantly higher with the expert ratings for the participants who had not listed their cognitions first.

And the students who simply rated the jams used their feelings to make their judgments. On the other hand, the students who were asked to list their thoughts about the jams had some extra information to use in making their judgments, but it was information that was not actually useful.

Therefore, when these students used their thoughts about the jam to make the judgments, their judgments were less valid. MacDonald, Zanna, and Fong showed male college students a video of two other college students, Mike and Rebecca, who were out on a date. According to random assignment to conditions, half of the men were shown the video while sober and the other half viewed the video after they had had several alcoholic drinks.

In the video, Mike and Rebecca go to the campus bar and drink and dance. At this point the film clip ends, and the male participants are asked about their likely behaviors if they had been Mike. Although all men indicated that having unprotected sex in this situation was foolish and irresponsible, the men who had been drinking alcohol were more likely to indicate that they would engage in sexual intercourse with Rebecca even without a condom. One interpretation of this study is that sexual behavior is determined by both cognitive factors e.

When the students were intoxicated at the time the behavior was to be performed, it seems likely the affective component of the attitude was a more important determinant of behavior than was the cognitive component.

One other type of match that has an important influence on the attitude-behavior relationship concerns how we measure the attitude and behavior. Attitudes predict behavior better when the attitude is measured at a level that is similar to the behavior to be predicted. Normally, the behavior is specific, so it is better to measure the attitude at a specific level too. For instance, if we measure cognitions at a very general level e. This can be done in different ways, such as:.

A classic example of cognitive dissonance is John, a year-old who enlists in the military. During boot camp he is awakened at a. It gets worse. Recruits that make it to week 11 of boot camp have to do 54 hours of continuous training. Figure 2. A person who has chosen a difficult path must deal with cognitive dissonance in addition to many other discomforts.

Not surprisingly, John is miserable. No one likes to be miserable. In this type of situation, people can change their beliefs, their attitudes, or their behaviors.

The last option, a change of behaviors, is not available to John. He has signed on to the military for four years, and he cannot legally leave. If John keeps thinking about how miserable he is, it is going to be a very long four years.

He will be in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. As an alternative to this misery, John can change his beliefs or attitudes. I am learning discipline and how to defend myself and my country. What I am doing is really important. He then will feel better and not experience cognitive dissonance, which is an uncomfortable state.

The military example demonstrates the observation that a difficult initiation into a group influences us to like the group more. Another social psychology concept, justification of effort , suggests that we value goals and achievements that we put a lot of effort into.

According to this theory, if something is difficult for us to achieve, we believe it is more worthwhile. For example, if you move to an apartment and spend hours assembling a dresser you bought from Ikea, you will value that more than a fancier dresser your parents bought you. We do not want to have wasted time and effort to join a group that we eventually leave. There are three important attitudes toward work that OB has traditionally studied: job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment.

There are two other work-related attitudes that are attracting attention: perceived organizational support and employee engagement.

However, studies have suggested that people might change their behavior, if the inconsistencies between their beliefs and behavior are pointed out to them.

A positive attitude gets the work done and motivates others to do the same without dwelling on the challenges that inevitably come up in any job.

It is the enthusiastic employee who creates an environment of goodwill and who provides a positive role model for others. The major job attitudes are job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment. They are all alike by either really liking their job or really hating it.

Job satisfaction describes a positive feeling about a job. At work, two job attitudes have the greatest potential to influence how we behave. These are job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Job satisfaction refers to the feelings people have toward their job. Job satisfaction and organizational commitment are two key attitudes that are the most relevant to important outcomes.

Attitudes create an intention to behave in a certain way and may predict actual behavior under certain conditions. People develop positive work attitudes as a result of their personality, fit with their environment, stress levels they experience, relationships they develop, perceived fairness of their pay, company policies, interpersonal treatment, whether their psychological contract is violated, and the presence of policies ….

Decreased Productivity and Performance For example, if one employee begins complaining, his discontent might spread to other workers. Bad attitudes also can trickle downward. Pervasively negative attitudes can have a detrimental effect on performance, causing employees to become apathetic and despondent. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Lifehacks What are the 4 types of attitude?

Ben Davis March 8, What are the 4 types of attitude? What are attitudes in psychology? What are the factors affecting attitude? What are the three components of an attitude psychology? What is attitude example? What is your positive attitude? What is positive attitude example? How can I improve my positive attitude?

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