ATTITUDES

• Attitude is defined as a predisposition involving beliefs, feelings and dispositions to act towards some object. The object may be anything- a person, group or an idea.
• Attitude is defined as lasting evaluations of various aspects of the social world that are stored in the memory.
• Belief refers to the cognitive component of an attitude, which forms the ground on which attitudes stand.
• Beliefs link objects to attributes.
• We have evaluative feelings about beliefs, and these will contribute to our attitude.
• Perception allows us to understand other people around us. It allows us to make judgments, and form impressions about other people.
• Social perception is based on our observation and preexisting knowledge. It gives us tools or ideas to understand how other people affect our personal lives and also provides us with necessary information about how people usually behave across situations.
• The nature and quality or property of an object determine one's attitude.
• An individual's attitudes may not always be exhibited through behaviour.
• There is a consistency between an individual's attitudes and behaviour when the attitude is strong and occupies a central place in the attitude system.
• There is a consistency between an individual's attitudes and behaviour when the person is aware of his/her attitude.
• There is a consistency between an individual's attitudes and behaviour when there is very little or no external pressure on the person to behave in a particular way.
• There is a consistency between an individual's attitudes and behaviour when the person's behaviour is not being watched or evaluated by others.
• There is a consistency between an individual's attitudes and behaviour when the person thinks their behaviour will have positive consequence and therefore intends to engage in that behaviour.
• Attitudes may not always predict the actual pattern of one's behaviour.
• Ideally, positive attitudes manifest well-adjusted behaviours.
• Pointing out inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviour can redirect the behaviour.
• Behaviour is influenced not just by our attitude but by a number of factors including our preconceived notion about self, monetary factor, social influence, social norms, peer pressure etc.
• The cognitive component represents the belief that one has about an object, implying thereby how we evaluate the characteristics of a person, object or place. This evaluation could be positive or negative.
• The component of affect deals with the way one feels about the attitudinal objects when one thinks about it, or interacts or communicates with any person. Our liking or disliking for some person refers to the affective component of an attitude.
• The third component of attitude refers to the actual behaviour. If one has a positive attitude about someone, his/her actions would be favourable. One approves of the behaviour, defends it before others and helps and supports them.
• Feelings highlight the affective component of attitudes. The knowledge about the activity constitutes the cognitive component of an attitude. Finally, attitudes have a behavioural component.
• The learning theories of forming attitudes constitute instrumental conditioning, observational learning and classical conditioning.
• The consistency theories of forming attitudes focus on the individual's attempt to maintain consistency amongst attitudes s/he holds. They include balance theory and cognitive dissonance.
• The balance theory involves the relations between a person and two attitude objects. The three objects are connected by either favourable or unfavourable attitudes. The person tries to restore balance by changing one or more attitudes so that they align with one another.
• Balance theory doesn't predict that imbalance will always be resolved, but there is a tendency toward balance and that unbalanced structures produce tensions and discomfort.
• The creation of dissonance, similar to the creation of imbalance, is thought to be distressful and to motivate the person to restore consonance.
• Cognitive-response approaches focus on the fact that the recipient does more than react to external information, but also generates thoughts about the information. These thoughts can increase, neutralise or even reverse the intended impact of the information.
• From a cognitive-response point of view, recipients do not merely process information passively, they actively react to information with their own personal thoughts. As the number of favourable thoughts increased, so did the degree of attitude change.
• Persuasion is defined as the process through which one or more persons attempt to alter the attitude of one or more others.
• Experts are more persuasive than non-experts.
• Messages that do not appear to be designed to change our attitudes are often more successful in this respect than ones that seem intended to reach this goal.
• Attractive sources are more effective in changing attitudes.
• People are sometimes more susceptible to persuasion when they are distracted by some extraneous event than when they are paying full attention to what is being said.
• When an audience holds attitudes contrary to those of a would-be persuader, it is more effective for the communicator to adopt a two-sided approach, in which both sides of the argument are presented.
• People who speak rapidly are often more persuasive.
• Persuasion can be enhanced by messages that arouse strong emotions (especially fear).
• Human beings have tendencies to process persuasive messages in two ways - systematic processing (central route) and heuristic processing (peripheral route).
• Systematic processing involves careful consideration of message content (paying careful attention to the message), and heuristic processing is based on simple rule of thumb, involves mental shortcuts and is less effortful (allows us to react to the persuasive message in an automatic manner)
• Cognitive dissonance is one of the key aspects of attitude.