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Attitudes are the complex combination of things we usually call personality, beliefs, values, behaviors, and motivations. All people, regardless of their status or intelligence, have attitudes. The attitude exists in the mind of each person. It helps define our identity, guide our actions, and influence how we judge people. Although the feeling and belief components of attitude are internal to a person, we can see a person's attitude from their behavior. Attitude helps us define how we see life situations, as well as define how we behave. One of the characteristics of attitudes is to provide internal cognitions or beliefs and thoughts about people and objects. The attitude Explicit is one in which we are aware, the implicit attitude is unconscious, but it still has an effect on our behaviors.
You may also be interested in: Attitude functions - examples and types of attitude Index- Attitudinal bipolarity
- The consistency of attitudes
- Attitudinal ambivalence
Attitudinal bipolarity
Any attitude rests on the existence of an attitudinal continuum. In fact, the main measurement techniques (Thurstone and semantic differential) adopt this assumption.
However, some very significant attitudes (political attitudes, towards abortion or towards the use of nuclear energy) do not seem to be one-dimensional Þ It poses problems when conceptualizing and measuring them and, consequently, jeopardizes the possibility of understanding adequately its dynamics and operation.
From the acceptance of the assumption of unidimensionality, a series of implications are derived: The first in this case is that these 2 political positions are contradictory and opposite.
Kerlinger, investigated this problem and came to the conclusion that this political attitude is not one-dimensional:
- The liberal not oppose conservative assumptions, not evaluate negative but neutral (midpoint of the continuum). Conservatives do the same with liberal ideology.
- Liberal or conservative people do so based on a series of positive references (liberals: freedom, tolerance and equality. Conservatives: maintenance of the status quo, religion, private property). These referents are "criterial" (they serve the person to orient themselves socially and fix their social position in front of others). Contrary to what could be predicted from the assumption of unidimensionality, there are no negative criteria referents.
Kristiansen and Zanna, studying attitudes towards abortion and the use of nuclear energy, found similar results.
Kerlinger's general conclusion: In those attitudes people have only or predominantly positive criterial referents, the idea of one-dimensionality and attitudinal bipolarity cannot be maintained.
Two reasons:
- The person may not be familiar with those values that are the opposite of those he holds, so they are irrelevant to him.
- By way of a defensive mechanism for their own beliefs and values, the person denies relevance to the opposite values in order to better protect their own.
The consistency of attitudes
Attitude can be expressed in 3 different ways (cognitive, affective and behavioral). You would have to expect those 3 ways to work at the same time. If so, it would have to be concluded that there is attitudinal consistency. However, this is not always the case, because many attitudes originate from affective experiences or behavioral exchanges of the person with the attitudinal object, that is, not all attitudes arise from a precise, detailed and weighted knowledge of the object. The person develops attitudes whose strength and stability do not depend on his beliefs about the object, but on the affective charge of the object for him, or on a high familiarity. There would be evaluative-cognitive inconsistency.
The evaluative-cognitive consistency occurs between the global evaluation of the attitudinal object and the resulting evaluation of the set of its beliefs. Fieshbein and Ajzen, in the theory of reasoned action, found high correlations between these two measures (the direct measure of the global attitudinal evaluation and the sum of products subjective probability x subjective desirability of the salient beliefs). However, even in the most favorable case, there was room reserved for inconsistency (only a correlation of r = 1 would speak of perfect consistency). The sources of this type of inconsistency can be two:
- The existence of beliefs that do not harmonize with the global evaluation (the attitude, rather than a cognitive origin, is affective or behavioral).
- The inexistence of beliefs about the attitudinal object, which prevent the attitude from being well defined. Concept of no attitude: People do not develop attitudes towards objects to which they do not pay attention or with which they do not have any type of contact.
The consequences of the evaluative-cognitive consistency of the attitude have to do with its instability. Inconsistent attitudes do not fulfill well the fundamental function of attitude, which is that of the orientation of the person in his social world. Two studies explain why this is so. Both show the greatest stability of consistent attitudes:
- Chaiken and Yates: People with consistent attitudes handle information that is inconsistent with their attitude better.
- Chaiken and Baldwin: The beliefs of the people with higher consistency, maintained correlations with each other of greater intensity.
Attitudinal ambivalence
Cognitive ambivalence can occur:
- In the cognitive component of the attitude: When beliefs about the object of the attitude are inconsistent with each other (smokers).
- In the affective component of the attitude: Existence of mixed or conflicting feelings in relation to the attitudinal object (attitude towards many political leaders, respected as well as feared).
In summary, ambivalence is a special case of inconsistency, that which occurs between beliefs (cognitive) or between affects (affective).
Focusing on beliefs and under the assumption that an ambivalent attitudinal object includes positive and negative characteristics, Kaplan proposed a procedure to measure attitudinal ambivalence in the cognitive component: Evaluate positive and negative characteristics separately. The traditional semantic differential would use the entire continuum for measurement:
My co-worker is
-3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3
Unable ------------------ Capable
Kaplan proposes 2 separate unipolar measurements:
My co-worker is
Capable…. 0 +1 +2 +3
Unable 0 -1 -2 -3
There will be ambivalence if:
- The evaluation of the two characteristics is very polarized, it is very extreme (The person feels both a strong attraction and a strong rejection towards the attitudinal object).
- The evaluation is very equal in terms of its absolute value, although it is not very extreme (At the same time that he feels attraction, he also feels rejection).
Ambivalence makes attitudes tend to be unstable and affects their relationship with behavior. The context can have a very striking influence on these attitudes by making positive characteristics more salient in some cases and negative characteristics in others.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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