WHAT IS ATTITUDE?

Attitude described as mental state of readiness organized through experience influencing directly to the
individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is treated.

COMPONENTS OF ATTITUDE
• AFFECTIVE COMPONENT: how the object, person, issue or event make you feel.
• BEHAVIORAL COMPONENT: how the attitude influences your behavior.
• COGNITIVE COMPONENT: your thoughts and beliefs about the object

TYPES OF ATTITUDE
• EXPLICIT: consciously accessible attitudes that are controllable and easy to report
• IMPLICIT: unconscious association between objects and evaluative responses

CHARACTERISTICS AND PROPERTIES OF ATTITUDES

• Attitudes always imply a subject-object relationship.
• Attitudes in relations to subjects, persons and values may/may not have motivational appeal
initially.
• Attitude give direction to one’s behavior and actions.
• Attitudes are colored with motivational and evaluative characteristics.
• Attitudes are not innate but learned acquired and conditioned.
• Attitude is always neutral. It is always colored with some sort of emotions.
• Attitude have effective properties of varying degrees.
• Attitudes are more/less enduring organizations/enduring state of readiness.
• Attitudes have cognitive, affective and behavioral components.
• Except few, most of the attitudes are clustered or related to each other

FUNCTIONS OF ATTITUDE
• ADJUSTMENT FUNCTION: The holding of a particular attitude leads to reward or the avoidance
of punishment.
• VALUE EXPRESSION FUNCTION: The individual gets satisfaction by expression of attitudes
appropriate to his personal values.
• KNOWLEDGE FUNCTION: attitudes have a cognition function in the sense that they help in
understanding things properly.
• EGO DEFENSIVE FUNCTION: it provides against the knowledge and acceptance of basic
unpleasant truths.

ATTITUDE FORMATION:
• LEARNING ATTITUDES BY ASSOCIATION
• LEARNING ATTITUDES BY BEING REWARDD/PUNISHED
• LEARNING THROUGH MODELLING
• LEARNING ATTITUDES THROUGH GROUP OR CULTURAL NORMS
 • LEARNING THROUGH EXPOSURE TO INFORMATION

ATTITUDE CHANGE
• THE CONCEPT OF BALANCE

Fritz Heider described P-O-X triangle, which represents the relationship between 3 aspects of
attitude. The basic idea is that an attitude changes if there is a state of imbalance between the P-O
attitude, O-X attitude, and P-X attitude. This is because imbalance is logically uncomfortable.
Therefore, the attitude changes in the direction of balance

BALANCE IMBALANCE

When 3 sides are positive When 3 sides are negative

When 2 sides are negative, and one side is When 1 side is negative, and 2 sides are
positive positive

B C

• THE CONCEPT OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Cognitive dissonance is all about the consequences of inconsistency. We prefer consistency over
inconsistency and work hard to maintain consistency among our cognitions.

• THE TWO STEP CONCEPT

According to S.M Mohsin, attitude change take place in two steps

- the target of change identifies with the source

- source first of all shows an attitude change by changing own attitude towards the issue
FACTORS THAT INFLUECNE ATTITUDE CHANGE
• CHARACTERISTICS OF EXISTING ATTITUDE
• SOURCE CHARACTERISTICS
• MESSAGE CHARACTERISTICS
• TARGET CHARACTERISTICS