Attitude (psychology)
[1]: 13 Attitudes include beliefs (cognition), emotional responses (affect) and behavioral tendencies (intentions, motivations).
For individuals, attitudes are cognitive schema that provide a structure to organize complex or ambiguous information, guiding particular evaluations or behaviors.
More abstractly, attitudes serve higher psychological needs: expressive or symbolic functions (affirming values), maintaining social identity, and regulating emotions.
[3]: 2 The American Psychological Association (APA) defines attitude as "a relatively enduring and general evaluation of an object, person, group, issue, or concept on a dimension ranging from negative to positive.
Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, for example, define an attitude as "a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
[7] These influences tend to be more powerful for strong attitudes which are accessible and based on elaborate supportive knowledge structure.
Methodological advances have allowed researchers to consider with greater precision the existence and implications of possessing implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) attitudes.
[8]: 1 [9] A sociological approach relates attitudes to concepts of values and ideologies that conceptualize the relationship of thought to action at higher levels of analysis.
For example, the individualism-collectivism dimension suggests that Western and Eastern societies differ fundamentally in the priority given to individual vs. group goals.
Ideologies represent more generalized orientations that seek to make sense of related attitudes and values, and are the basis for moral judgements.
Commonly used measures include Likert scales which records agreement or disagreement with a series of belief statements.
Explicit attitudes that develop in response to recent information, automatic evaluation were thought to reflect mental associations through early socialization experiences.
Hence the impact of contextual influences was assumed to be obfuscate assessment of a person's "true" and enduring evaluative disposition as well as limit the capacity to predict subsequent behavior.
Implicit measures help account for these situations and look at attitudes that a person may not be aware of or want to show.
[13] The classic, tripartite view offered by Rosenberg and Hovland in 1960 is that an attitude contains cognitive, affective, and behavioral components.
[25] Empirical research, however, fails to support clear distinctions between thoughts, emotions, and behavioral intentions associated with a particular attitude.
The cognitive component of attitudes refers to the beliefs, thoughts, and attributes that a person associates with an object.
Persuasion theories say that in politics, successful persuaders convince its message recipients into a selective perception or attitude polarization for turning against the opposite candidate through a repetitive process that they are in a noncommittal state and it is unacceptable and does not have any moral basis for it and for this they only require to chain the persuading message into a realm of plausibility.
Fazio believes that because there is deliberative process happening, individuals must be motivated to reflect on their attitudes and subsequent behaviors.
[43] Daniel Katz, for example, writes that attitudes can serve "instrumental, adjustive or utilitarian," "ego-defensive," "value-expressive," or "knowledge" functions.
As an example, the ego-defensive function might be used to influence the racially prejudicial attitudes of an individual who sees themselves as open-minded and tolerant.
By appealing to that individual's image of themselves as tolerant and open-minded, it may be possible to change their prejudicial attitudes to be more consistent with their self-concept.
The ego-defensive notion correlates with Downward Comparison Theory, which argues that derogating a less fortunate other increases a person's own subjective well-being.
[50] The most famous example of such a theory is Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger, which explains that when the components of an attitude (including belief and behavior) are at odds an individual may adjust one to match the other (for example, adjusting a belief to match a behavior).
Attitudes are part of the brain's associative networks, the spider-like structures residing in long-term memory that consist of affective and cognitive nodes.
In primarily affective networks, it is more difficult to produce cognitive counterarguments in the resistance to persuasion and attitude change.
Research suggests that predicting emotions is an important component of decision making, in addition to the cognitive processes.
Any discrete emotion can be used in a persuasive appeal; this may include jealousy, disgust, indignation, fear, blue, disturbed, haunted, and anger.
While evidence is inconclusive, there appears to be potential for targeted attitude change is receivers with low political message involvement.
Important factors that influence the impact of emotional appeals include self-efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features.
