How Attitudes Form, Change and Shape Our Behavior
What Is an Attitude?
Attitudes are defined as a learned tendency to evaluate things in a certain way, by Psychologists, which can also include the evaluations of people, issues, objects or events. These evaluations can either often be positive or negative. These can also be uncertain at times such as, an individual might have mixed feelings about a particular person or issue. It is also suggested by researchers that there are several different components that makes up attitude such as an emotional component which looks at how the person object event or issue makes one feels. It also looks at the cognitive component which takes into consideration the individuals thoughts and beliefs about the particular subject and the behavioural component which looks at how his/her attitude influences their behavior.
According to Cherry K., “attitudes can also be explicit and implicit. Explicit attitudes are those that we are consciously aware of and that clearly influence our behaviors and beliefs while implicit attitudes are unconscious, but still have an effect on our beliefs and behaviors.”
According to Cherry K, “attitudes form directly as a result of experience. They may emerge due to direct personal experience such as social roles and, or they may result from observation such as social norms.” These factors can have a strong influence on attitudes as social roles relate to how people are expected to behave in a particular role or context while, social norms involve society 's rules for what behaviors are considered appropriate. Attitudes can be learned in a variety of ways for example, advertisers use classical conditioning to influence an individual’s attitude toward a particular product. A television commercial will show young, beautiful people having fun on a tropical beach while enjoying a sport drink. Therefore, this attractive and appealing imagery may cause whomever is watching it to develop a positive
References: http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/introopcond.htm