Everything You Need To Know About Attitude

Attitude Notes for UPSC Exams

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Attitude Notes

Attitude notes play a pivotal role in preparing for competitive exams, offering insights into the psychological aspects that influence human behavior and interaction. These notes cover theories of attitude formation, change, and the impact on personal and professional life, essential for understanding ethics and interpersonal skills in various contexts, including civil services.

Everything You Need To Know About Attitude

Attitude

Attitude is a learned predisposition or a tendency to respond consistently towards an object favourably or unfavourably. It can also be defined as a predisposition to react to a certain stimulus in a particular manner.

Further, this tendency or predisposition is ‘learned’ and shaped by society, and it is enduring, i.e., attitudes do not change easily.

Various psychologists define attitude differently. Carl Jung defines attitude as a “readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way”. As per Eagly and Chaiken, Attitude is “a psychological tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour.”

Editor’s Message

You can follow any of the above definitions with which you feel most connected and explain well with the help of a suitable example.

Characteristics of Attitude:

Attitude is a mental and emotional entity that characterises a person. It has the following characteristics:

  • Evaluative: Attitudes guide individuals in assessing the rightness or wrongness of their actions and determining how to act in morally challenging situations.
  • Contextual: Attitudes in ethics are influenced by personal beliefs, cultural norms, societal expectations, and individual experiences, and they play a cabbalistic (mystical) role in shaping an individual’s ethical conduct.
  • Multidimensional: Attitudes are a complex set of tendencies, having different modes of formation and playing different functions, which we will learn in the article.
  • Enduring: Attitudes do not change easily. It requires new learnings and a greater degree of persuasion to change attitudes.
  • But it can vary over time: Attitudes hold various functions for humans, such as helping in our judgement, holding our personality, etc. Newer attitudes can be adopted if they have greater utility than the older ones.
  • Influence behaviour: It is the most important aspect of attitude that has the greatest influence over our behaviour.Everything You Need To Know About Attitude

Components of Attitude:

Attitude has three components determining why and how we have a certain attitude towards an object. These are cognitive, affective and behavioural components.

1. Cognitive Component

  • It is the knowledge part of our attitude towards the object. This is the mental component that involves our beliefs, ideas, and thoughts that we have.
  • It refers to that part of attitude that is related to the general know-how of a person.

2. Affective Component

  • It deals with the feelings and emotions one has for the attitude object.
  • People may have strong emotions for certain objects, and thus, there is a strong reaction to those objects, which also overpowers other factors such as cognition.
  • Such dominance of the affective component may also lead to prejudice among individuals.
  • It may result from past life experiences for longer periods in life.

3. Behavioral Component

  • Behaviour, generally, is the reflection of attitude. But behaviour also results in attitude, as when a certain type of behaviour is discouraged or encouraged towards the attitude object.
  • This results in a changed attitude towards the same object.
  • This is the action component, specifically, the predisposition to act a certain way toward the object.
  • The behavioural component reflects the intentions of a person in the short run or the long run.

All these components are strengthened and supported by each other.     Everything You Need To Know About AttitudeFor example:

If an individual likes singing (affective component) and believes it helps in mental health management  (cognitive element), then the Individual is likely to join a singing class (behavioural component).

Though most attitudes have all three components, they are most strongly rooted in either the cognitive or the affective components.

Formation of Attitude

Attitudes are learned and enduring predispositions/tendencies to act. We must then understand how these attitudes are formed.

Following are the techniques with which we learn to evaluate attitude objects and hence, a particular type of attitude is formed towards them:

Learning by Association/Social Observation/Role Model approach:

This involves learning from our social environment, such as family, school, and media, and its expression.

  1. The first level of association happened at the level of Parents and Family. We form our attitudes towards something by learning from our parents.
  2. The next level of association happened at the school level with teachers and friends.
  3. The third level of the association is at the organisational level, where we work in our peer group.

If we are a company of good people, we develop good attitudes. Or even by associating with books, we can learn certain attitudes.

For example, children learn to respect elders by observing parents. Seeing elders in the home treating house helpers differently makes children behave in the same manner. Thus, an attitude of class-based discrimination is passed on from one generation to another.

Instrumental Conditioning/principle of reward and punishment:

A process in which a positive behaviour, when rewarded, has more chances of repetition, unlike the negative behaviour, which, if repeated, would lead to punishment and, thus, fewer chances of repetition.

For example, If the school celebrates the success of children by rewarding them, this will form a positive attitude of the child towards studying. On the other hand, when a teacher punishes a child for cheating in an exam, it discourages the child from cheating again.

Classical/ Pavlovian Conditioning :

When a person is repeatedly exposed to a positive and neutral stimulus, and after some time, the response to neutral stimuli becomes the same as the response to positive stimuli.

For example: In Pavlov’s Experiment, he rang a bell shortly before presenting food to his dog. At first, the dog elicited no response to the bells. However, eventually, the dog began to salivate at the sound of the bell alone.

Everything You Need To Know About AttitudeIn the above experiment, the ringing of the bell was the conditioned stimulus, and the conditioned response was salivation.

Other Factors affecting attitudes

Learning Attitudes through Cultural Norms:

We learn attitudes through the various norms of our culture. Norms are verbal rules about behaviour that everyone is supposed to be shown under some specific circumstances.

Over time, these norms integrated as a part of our social cognition in the form of attitudes.

For Example: In Indian culture, we generally prefer family values over individualism.

Personal Experiences:

Many attitudes are shaped through personal life experiences, which brings a drastic change in people’s Attitudes towards others and their own lives.

For example, the Four Sights (old age, disease, demise, asceticism) that  Siddharta observed outside his palace changed his view of life, and he ultimately became Buddha.

Genetic Factors:

Psychologists have found that genetic factors also play a strong role in shaping some attitudes.

For example, Attitudes involving gut-level preferences (say, a preference for a certain kind of food) may be more strongly influenced by genetic factors than attitudes that are more cognitive in nature (say, attitudes towards environment conservation).

By reading/observing other great personalities:

Books serve to encourage us, teach us and inspire us. Focusing on something positive will help you to keep a positive mindset throughout the day.

Structure:

Attitude structure answers the question of how positive and negative evaluations are organised within and between the 3 components- cognitive, affective and behavioural. It is necessary that the above 3 components of attitude are always positive.

For example, I have positive cognition (saving lives) towards blood donation, but when asked to donate blood (behavioural), I  respond negatively because of negative emotions (affective), like fear of needles.

Thus, there are two perspectives on attitude structuring:

One-dimensional Perspective:

  • In this, it is assumed that the presence of positive beliefs, emotions, and behaviour prevents the occurrence of negative beliefs, emotions and behaviour. They are extreme opposites of a scale.
  • This perspective thus implies that there is consistency in a person’s attitude towards the attitude object, and there will be no attitudinal ambivalence.Everything You Need To Know About Attitude

Two-dimensional Perspective

  • This suggests that positive and negative elements are stored along two separate dimensions.
  • One dimension reflects positive beliefs, emotions, and behaviour elements, and the other dimension reflects many negative beliefs, emotions, and behaviour elements.
  • The attitude may lie anywhere on this two-dimensional plane.
  • This view proposes that people can possess any combination of positivity and negativity in their attitudes.Everything You Need To Know About Attitude

Everything You Need To Know About Attitude

Function of attitudes

The functional utility of attitudes was pointed out by Allport in his classic discussion of attitudes. According to him, attitude was social psychology’s most indispensable concept.

Daniel Katz has also given a classification on it. He takes the view that attitudes are determined by the functions they serve for us and distinguishes 4 types of psychological functions that attitudes meet. Let us examine these four functions now.

1. Utilitarian function:

We develop certain attitudes towards objects that aid or reward us. We want to maximise rewards and minimise penalties. Katz says we develop positive attitudes towards those objects that are associated with rewards and negative attitudes toward those that are associated with punishment.

For example, suppose you are looking for a government job, and you belong to a minority community. In that case, you will have a positive attitude towards the political party that supports the reservation system. On the other hand, if you belong to the majority, you might develop a negative attitude towards the same party.

We are more likely to change our attitudes if doing so allows us to fulfil our goals or avoid undesirable consequences.

2. Knowledge function

We all have a need to attain some degree of meaningful, stable, clear, and organised view of the world. Attitudes satisfy this knowledge function by providing a frame of reference for organising our world so that it makes sense.

  • Using such a cognitive perspective, attitudes serve as schemas that help us organise and interpret social information. It helps us understand the world better so that we have consistency in our beliefs.
  • Thus, attitude provides a frame of reference for organising the world so that it makes some meaning.
  • For example, people who hold traditional gender stereotypes will have greater satisfaction with the current status of women at work and will explain the low number of women in high positions in an office with traditional gender explanations.

3. Ego defensive function

Some attitudes defend us from conceding basic truths about ourselves or the harsh realities of life. Such attitudes defend our self-esteem from remorse or guilt.

  • These can help a person cope with emotional conflicts and protect self-esteem and self-image in the world or justify actions that make them feel guilty and are not desirable in the world.
  • For example, parents might develop a positive attitude toward hitting their child and justify it as a disciplining mechanism. Similarly, a lazy person might see poverty as a consequence of the unjustified distribution of wealth in society rather than a consequence of not working hard.
  • Constructive impact of ego-defensive function: Such a function also playes a positive role in developing our personality. For example, criticism would become obvious if a person walks on a daring new path, which everyone sees as a sure recipe for failure. But it’s the ego-defensive function that gives us enough confidence to achieve the impossible.

4. Value expressive function

Value-expressive attitudes show ‘who we are and what we stand for’. Hence, they serve to demonstrate one’s self-image to others and to express our basic values. This function comes from a humanistic perspective.

  • It seems logical to assume that only important and strongly self-related attitudes should serve the value-expressive function.
  • For example, you may have a negative attitude towards homosexuals because your religion considers homosexuality to be immoral. Even if you have never had a bad experience with someone homosexual, it is irrelevant. Your negative attitude allows you to express an important value associated with a religious group with which you strongly identify.Everything You Need To Know About Attitude

5. The Social identity function

Other than the basic four functions served by attitudes suggested by Katz, Shavitt added another social identity function of attitudes.

  • This refers to the informativeness of attitudes for person impressions or how much attitudes appear to convey about the people who hold them.
  • For example, the purchase of an Indian flag on Republic Day may be driven primarily by social identity goals rather than patriotic motivation.

This article deals with the psychological aspect of attitude. In the following articles, we shall examine the relationship between attitude and morality and its application in public life and in civil services.Everything You Need To Know About Attitude

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