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Information about Attitude (psychology)

This article is about a psychological term. For other meanings, see Attitude.

Attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are positive, negative or neutral views of an "attitude object": i.e. a person, behaviour or event. People can also be "ambivalent" towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative bias towards the attitude in question.

Attitudes comes from judgments. Attitudes develop on the ABC model (affect, behavioral change and cognition). The affective response is a physiological response that expresses an individual's preference for an entity. The behavioral intention is a verbal indication of the intention of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity to form an attitude. Most attitudes in individuals are a result of observational learning from their environment. The link between attitude and behavior exists but depends on human behavior, some of which is irrational. For example, a person who is in favor of blood transfusion may not donate blood. This makes sense if the person does not like the sight of blood, which explains this irrationality.

Implicit and explicit attitudes

There is also considerable research on "implicit" attitudes, which are unconscious but have effects (identified through sophisticated methods using people's response times to stimuli). Implicit and "explicit" attitudes seem to affect people's behavior, though in different ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases they are. The relationship between them is poorly understood.

Philosophical aspect

Attitude may also be seen as a form or appearance that an individual assumes to gain or achieve an egotistic preference, whether it is acceptance, manifestation of power or other self-centered needs. Attitude may be considered as a primitive attribute to the preservation of the self or of the ego.

Attitude formation

Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience. Tesser (1993) has argued that hereditary variables may affect attitudes - but believes that they may do so indirectly. For example, if one inherits the disposition to become an extrovert, this may affect one's attitude to certain styles of music. There are numerous theories of attitude formation and attitude change. These include:

Factors that affect attitude change

Attitudes can be changed through persuasion. The celebrated work of Carl Hovland, at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to advance knowledge of persuasion. In Hovland's view, we should understand attitude change as a response to communication. He and his colleagues did experimental research into the factors that can affect the persuasiveness of a message:

1. Target Characteristics: These are characteristics that refer to the person who receives and processes a message. One such is intelligence trait intelligence - it seems that more intelligent people are less easily persuaded by one-sided messages. Another variable that has been studied in this category is self esteem. Although it is sometimes thought that those higher in self-esteem are less easily persuaded, there is some evidence that the relationship between self-esteem and persuasibility is actually curvilinear, with people of moderate self-esteem being more easily persuaded than both those of high and low self-esteem levels (Rhodes & Woods, 1992). The mind frame and mood of the target also plays a role in this process.

2. Source Characteristics: The major source characteristics are expertise, Trust trustworthiness and Interpersonal attraction/attractiveness. The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a key variable here (Hovland & Weiss, 1951); if one reads a report on health and believes it comes from a professional medical journal, one may be more easily persuaded than if one believes it is from a popular newspaper. Some psychologists have debated whether this is a long-lasting effect and Hovland and Weiss (1951) found the effect of telling people that a message came from a credible source disappeared after several weeks (the so-called "sleeper effect"). Whether there is a sleeper effect is controversial. Received wisdom is that if people are informed of the source of a message before hearing it, there is less likelihood of a sleeper effect than if they are told a message and then told its source.

3. Message Characteristics: The nature of the message plays a role in persuasion. Sometimes presenting both sides of a story is useful to help change attitudes.

4. Cognitive Routes: A message can appeal to an individual's cognitive evaluation to help change an attitude. In the central route to persuasion the individual is presented with the data and motivated to evaluate the data and arrive at an attitude changing conclusion. In the peripheral route to attitude change, the individual is encouraged to not look at the content but at the source. This is commonly seen in modern advertisements that feature Celebrity/celebrities. In some cases, Physician/doctors and experts are used. In other cases film stars are used for their attractiveness.

Attitude in the workplace

When it comes to Human Resource Management and recruiting, in recent years hire for attitude became a well known mantra. Several commercial tests such as the LAB Profile, Nowhere is your positive attitude more required and appreciated by others than your workplace. There are sound reasons for this: about 30% of an employee’s waking hours are spent at the workplace. Without some positive people around, this time could become troublesome. iWAM and PAPI were developed to measure work Attitude and motivation, e.g. for pre-employment testing

Jung's definition of attitude

Attitude is one of Jung's 57 definitions in Chapter XI of Psychological Types. Jung's definition of attitude is a "readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way" (Jung, [1921] 1971:par. 687). Attitudes very often come in pairs, one conscious and the other unconscious. Within this broad definition Jung defines several attitudes.

The main (but not only) attitude dualities that Jung defines are the following.
  • Consciousness and the unconscious. The "presence of two attitudes is extremely frequent, one conscious and the other unconscious. This means that consciousness has a constellation of contents different from that of the unconscious, a duality particularly evident in neurosis" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 687).
  • Extraversion and introversion. This pair is so elementary to Jung's theory of types that he labeled them the "attitude-types".
  • Rational and irrational attitudes. "I conceive reason as an attitude" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 785).
  • The rational attitude subdivides into the thinking and feeling psychological functions, each with its attitude.
  • The irrational attitude subdivides into the sensing and intuition psychological functions, each with its attitude. "There is thus a typical thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuitive attitude" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 691).
  • Individual and social attitudes. Many of the latter are isms.
In addition, Jung discusses the abstract attitude. “When I take an abstract attitude...” (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 679). Abstraction is contrasted with concretism. “CONCRETISM. By this I mean a peculiarity of thinking and feeling which is the antithesis of abstraction” (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 696).

MBTI definition of attitude

The MBTI write-ups limit the use of "attitude" to the extraversion-introversion (EI) and judging-perceiving (JP) indexes.
The JP index is sometimes referred to as an orientation to the outer world and sometimes JP is classified as an "attitude." In Jungian terminology the term attitude is restricted to EI. In MBTI terminology attitude can include EI and also JP. (Myers, 1985:293 note 7).
The above MBTI Manual statement, is restricted to EI," is directly contradicted by Jung's statement above that there is "a typical thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuitive attitude" and by his other uses of the term "attitude". Regardless of whether the MBTI simplification (or oversimplification) of Jung can be attributed to Myers, Gifts Differing refers only to the "EI preference", consistently avoiding the label "attitude". Regarding the JP index, in Gifts Differing Myers does use the terms "the perceptive attitude and the judging attitude" (Myers, 1980:8). The JP index corresponds to the irrational and rational attitudes Jung describes, except that the MBTI focuses on the preferred orientation in the outer world in order to identify the function hierarchy. To be consistent with Jung, it can be noted that a rational extraverted preference is accompanied by an irrational introverted preference. A "J" on the outside is a "P" on the inside and vice versa.

References

  • http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-10-12-mind-body_x.htm From USA Today "Power of a super attitude"
  • "The A-Word" by Paul Niquette
  • Jung, C.G. (1966). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Collected Works, Volume 7, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01782-4.
  • Jung, C.G. [1921] (1971). Psychological Types, Collected Works, Volume 6, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01813-8.
  • Myers, I. B. & Myers, P. B. (1980), ''Gifts Differing", Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. ISBN 0-89106-011-1
  • Myers, I. B. & McCaulley, M. H. (1985), ''Manual: a guide to the development and use of the Myers-Briggs type indicator", Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. ISBN 0-89106-027-8

See also



External links

Attitude may refer to:

  • Attitude (psychology)
  • Propositional attitude
  • Attitude, a pose in ballet.
  • Aircraft attitude
  • Attitude control in the context of spacecraft means determining and maintaining proper orientation in space.

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This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the for details.
This article has been tagged since September 2007.

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Cognition is a diffuse term, used in different ways by different disciplines. In psychology, it refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions.
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Physiology (from Greek: φυσις, physis, “nature, origin”; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is the study of the mechanical, physical, and biochemical functions of living organisms.
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For other uses, see Social learning.
Observational learning (also known as: vicarious learning or social learning or modeling) is learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and replicating behavior observed in others.
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Research is a human activity based on intellectual investigation and aimed at discovering, interpreting, and revising human knowledge on different aspects of the world. Research can use the scientific method, but need not do so.
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Self may refer to:
  • Self (sociology), the socially-constructed aspect of a person
  • Self (psychology), a key construct in several schools of psychology

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Ego is a Latin word meaning "I", from the Greek "Εγώ" meaning "I" and may refer to:
  • Ego, super-ego, and id, a psycho-analytic concept of Sigmund Freud
  • Ego (spirituality), a "sense of doership" or sense of individual existence
  • Ego

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Personality psychology is a branch of psychology which studies personality and individual differences. One emphasis in this area is to construct a coherent picture of a person and his or her major psychological processes.
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Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event. The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of experiment.
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Attitude may refer to:

  • Attitude (psychology)
  • Propositional attitude
  • Attitude, a pose in ballet.
  • Aircraft attitude
  • Attitude control in the context of spacecraft means determining and maintaining proper orientation in space.

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Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs, or from experiencing apparently conflicting phenomena.
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Leon Festinger (May 8, 1919 – February 11, 1989) was a social psychologist from New York City who became famous for his Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Festinger earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the City College of New York in 1939.
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Fritz Heider (1896-1988) was a German psychologist of the Gestalt school, responsible for developing balance theory and attribution theory in 1958. Born in Austria, he immigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s, teaching at Smith College and eventually University of EACAR.
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Self-perception theory is an account of attitude change developed by psychologist, Daryl Bem. It asserts that we develop our attitudes by observing our own behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused them.

Self-perception vs.


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Daryl J. Bem is a social psychologist at Cornell University, and the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude change. Bem received a B.A. from Reed College in physics in 1960.
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Meta-programs in general are programs that create, control or make decisions about programs, such as when and how to run them, preferred and unpreferred programs, and strategic choices of fall-back or alternative programs.
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Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an interpersonal communications model and an alternative approach to psychotherapy[1] based on the subjective study of language, communication and personal change.
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Persuasion is a form of social influence. It is the process of guiding people toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and symbolic (though not always logical) means. It is strategy of problem-solving relying on "appeals" rather than force.
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The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) is a model of how attitudes are formed and changed (see also attitude change). Central to this model is the "elaboration continuum", which ranges from low elaboration (low thought) to high elaboration
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The Social Judgment theory of attitude change was proposed by Carl Hovland and Muzafer Sherif. The judgment theory attempts to explain how attitude change is influenced by judgmental processes.
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Balance Theory is a motivational theory of attitude change proposed by Fritz Heider, which conceptualizes the consistency motive as a drive toward psychological balance. Heider proposed that "sentiment" or liking relationships are balanced if the affect valence in a system
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Intelligence is a property of mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. There are several ways to define intelligence.
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Carl Gustav Jung

A recent edition of Jung's partially autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
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Psychological Types, 1971 is the title of the sixth volume in the Princeton/Bollingen edition of the Collected Works of Carl Jung. it is a translation of "Psychologische Typen" published by Rascher Verlag, Zurich in 1921.
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Jung's theory of neurosis is based on the premise of a self-regulating psyche composed of tensions between opposing attitudes of the ego and the unconscious. A neurosis is a significant unresolved tension between these contending attitudes.
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Abstraction is the process of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose.
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Concretism may refer to one of the following
  • Concrete art, a form of abstractionism
  • Concrete poetry
  • Reism, a philosophical movement
  • concretism (psychology), an opposite of abstraction, see Attitude_(psychology)
  • Reification (fallacy)

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The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality questionnaire designed to identify certain psychological differences according to the typological theories of Carl Gustav Jung as published in his 1921 book Psychological Types (English edition, 1923).
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Allophilia—positive attitudes for a group that is not one’s own—is a term derived from Greek words meaning “liking or love of the other” (Pittinsky, 2005).
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