Psychology: Attitudes, Beliefs, and Consistency

Attitudes, Beliefs, and Consistency

• Attitudes are evaluations people make about objects, ideas, events, or other people.
• Attitudes denote a functional state of readiness that determines an organism to react in a characteristic way to certain stimuli or stimulus situations.

The ABC Components of Attitude

• Affect: Emotional responses
• Behaviour: Behavioural tendencies (verbal & non-verbal actions)
• Cognition: Thoughts, knowledge, and beliefs

The Cognitive Component

• Consists of a person's system of beliefs, perceptions, and stereotypes about the attitudinal object.
• Refers to ideas about the object.

The Affective Component

• Refers to the emotional aspect of the attitude, which is often deep-rooted and resists change.
• Indicates the direction and intensity of an individual's evaluation.

The Behavioural Component

• Indicates the tendency to react towards the object of attitude in certain specific ways.
• Predisposition to act in a certain manner towards the attitude object.

Characteristics and Properties of Attitudes

• Attitudes always imply a subject-object relationship.
• Attitudes in relation to objects, persons, and values may or may not have motivational appeal initially.
• Attitudes give a direction to one's behaviour and actions.
• Attitudes are coloured with motivational and evaluative characteristics.
• Attitudes are not innate but learned, acquired, and conditioned.
• Attitudes can be changed depending on circumstances, experiences, and how information is processed.

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

• Automatic attitudes are more difficult to measure than deliberate attitudes.
• Most measures of automatic attitudes involve measuring reaction times to stimuli.

How Attitudes Are Formed

• Experience: Attitudes form directly as a result of experience.
• Social Factors: Social roles and social norms can have a strong influence on attitudes.
• Learning: Attitudes can be learned in a variety of ways, including classical and operant conditioning.
• Exposure Effect: Mere exposure effect – tendency to come to like things simply because they are encountered repeatedly.

Attitude Change

• Heider's P-O-X Balance Theory: People will avoid having contradicting attitudes and evaluations of one object.
• Cognitive Dissonance Theory: Inconsistencies produce an unpleasant mental state called cognitive dissonance, leading people to rationalize their behavior or change their attitudes.

Consistency Theories

• Commonalities in theories about consistency: Specify conditions required for consistency and inconsistency, assume inconsistency is unpleasant, and specify conditions required to restore consistency.
• Cognitive dissonance theory proposes that inconsistencies produce an unpleasant mental state called cognitive dissonance, leading people to rationalize their behavior or change their attitudes.