Psychology attitudes

An attitude is a way of thinking or feeling which is typically reflected in a person’s behaviour. Attitudes are favourable or unfavourable way of viewing situations. They form an essential foundation for social thought; they are usually shaped by a person’s family environment, religion and education. Attitudes can help people adapt and adjust to new situations. A person’s attitude towards a situation can help to make decision making processes easier, faster and ensure the best possible outcome for a situation. Attitudes are most likely to affect behaviour when they are strong, well defined and accessible. The least productive attitudes are ambivalent ones, they tend also tend to produce the most unstable behavioural responses because of the mixture of attitudes, they are however the easiest to change. People tend to have similar attitudes to those around them, and in social situations will temper their responses in an attempt to compare them to those around them, this allows people to measure their attitudes to determine of their views are socially correct or not. Festinger (1954) describes this as social comparison. The only problem with comparing out attitudes to others is that there is the possibility of picking up on and adopting negative attitudes despite the fact that they contradict the automatic and unconscious evaluation of implicit attitudes. The structure of attitudes can be separated into three components, an ABC of attitudes. They consist of the Affective component which involves the feelings and emotions about the attitude object. Behavioural which is how the attitude influences how we act or behave and Cognitive this involves the person’s belief and attitudes around the attitude object.
There has been much research into attitudes, in an attempt to discover how people form attitudes and how they in turn impact upon behaviour. The cognitive approach focuses the internal mental processes used. It uses an analogy of the mind as a computer to