Attitudes

There are so many definition of attitudes, the most understandable is attitudes is a people evaluation of almost any aspect of the world. From the APA glossary, we found that attitude is the learned, relatively stable tendency to respond to people, concepts, and events in an evaluative way. The others definition are "Attitudes are associations between attitude objects (virtually any aspect of the social world) and evaluations of those objects" , "Attitudes are lasting evaluations of various aspects of the social world-evaluations that are stored in memory" and "An attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness organized through experience exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related."

There are various dimensions of attitudes in social psychology. As a social psychologist, we can do research on various dimension of attitudes. For example, people can have favorable or unfavorable reaction toward an issues, ideas, objects, actions, a specific person, and a entire social groups. A person such as Barack Obama, can you tell me what is yours attitudes toward this person? Besides, attitudes also can more strength than other. There are some attitudes that are more certainly and some of it are uncertain. In addition, some attitudes are quite stable and resistant to change, whereas others maybe unstable and show considerable variability depending on the situation.

The attitudes can divide into two main part which is the explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes. Explicit attitudes is that one reportable and conscious such as most gentle have explicit attitudes that all people can fair in anywhere no prejudice in gender, but they may be have implicit attitudes where they believe that man are more strong and suppose to dominant to this world. These are example of implicit attitudes too, meaning that this attitudes is unconscious and not accessible.

The are ton of measurement to measure attitudes, many of these concern selfreport measures of attitudes. The self-report is commonly use to measure the general attitudes of a thing. For example, the attitudes toward a specific pen can be measure by using a survey that consist of various question that contain the value or weight of the pen in the participants perception. The weight of the pen can be measure by adding likert scales to the end of question. There is another way to measure the implicit attitudes that are inaccessible by using the Implicit Attitudes Test (IAT).The IAT is based on the fact that we may associate various social objects more or less readily with positive or negative descriptive words. The quicker reactions to positive objects and one social group over another can reflect differential valuing of that group. But the limitation of this measurement is it is susceptible to deliberate faking as long as the people gain experience with the IAT. Below is the description provided before going for the IAT . " Whichever IAT you do, we will ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes toward or beliefs about these topics, and provide some general information about yourself. These demonstrations should be more valuable if you have also tried to describe your selfunderstanding of the characteristic that the IAT is designed to measure. Also, we would like to compare possible differences among groups in their IAT performance and opinions, at least among those who decide to participate."

Attitudes are able to influence on social cognition. They can function as schemas for organizing and interpreting information about social entities. When a person have different attitudes toward money from norm, he maybe will think and percept money as a different thing other than it value. Thus, the person maybe will have different behavior that act on money. Because attitudes may influence behavior in some where extent. People will behave in ways consistent with their attitudes just as the example above. But sometimes our behaviors do not always conform to attitudes.

Attitudes can also affect important behavioral choices that have long term consequences, it is important to understand how thought process influence attitude-based decision making. In given a situation, a patient who will die if didnt undergo surgery immediately. He never undergo surgery before and after doctor describe about the advantages and disadvantages consequences of surgery, he decided to do it. This is because he consider the future consequences of their actions reported more positive than negative thoughts about a surgery after reading balanced information from the doctor. Once the good attitudes toward the surgery form, we can predict the behavior of that person such as this medical decision making.

Attitude formation

Do you know about the Nike, Adidas, NBA, Barclay's Premier League, and Europe champion league? , and Europe champion league? Ya, I think your answer maybe you didnt try to search and found it before but hear your friend, spouse or family had talk about it. Am I right? Most of our attitudes about this world is build from the interaction with others person or simply observe the others. This type of attitudes forming is known as the process of the social learning. There are several type of social learning to form an attitudes toward this social world.

One of the famous social learning is Classical Conditioning. Which is basic form of learning in which one stimulus, initially neutral, acquires the capacity to evoke reactions through repeated pairing with another stimulus. In a sense, one stimulus become the signal for the presentation of another stimulus. The unconditioned stimulus is the stimulus that can stimuli a reaction, while the conditioned stimulus cant evoke the reaction. The conditioned stimulus only able to evoke reaction after several pairing with the unconditioned stimulus.

Classical Conditioning can affect the formation of attitudes by two pathways, which is the direct or indirect pathways. The direct classical conditioning is pairing the attitudes of a thing to positive attitudes that had been formed long time ago. As example is link the waiter job vacancy with comfortable environment in the high class restaurant, after a period of time the waiter job vacancy on high class restaurant will be apply by many people. Second type of classical conditioning is the indirect pathways. It link our attitudes on a new thing toward a famous thing's attitudes in our life or the society. Thus, when talk about the famous thing in conversation, we will remember the attitudes of the new thing. A good example is the advertisement that link to a famous celebrity such as David Beckham with the Nike.

The second type of social learning is the Instrumental conditioning or also known as the operant conditioning. During the operant conditioning a person are rewarded for expressing the "correct" attitudes or punished for "incorrect" attitudes. As example, when we wear a new shirt and walk on the shopping mall. If we received the good response and attention from the public, we are rewarded by the positive reinforcement hence a good attitudes will form on the shirt and vice versa. These also shown by a condition which we reach a new environment that strong opposite with our current environment. When you start act like what the people live at the environment, you will received the strong positive reinforcement from your new neighbor thus you had condition into a new environment.

The third type of social learning is the observation learning that devise by Bandura. Observational learning is defined as a person form attitudes by observing and then imitating models they like and admire. For example, we acquire a new fashion from observation of the latest magazine or the internet websites.

Other than social learning, social comparison also contribute to the formation of a attitudes. By compare ourselves with the others in order to determine whether our view of social reality is correct or not. That is, if our swimming style is totally similar to others swimming styles, we will conclude confidently that we had the correct swimming style even sometimes that will be some error occurs. Besides this, we not usually compare to anyone else in the society, we usually compare to the closer person and identify with them, those person is known as the reference group. A good example of reference group is our parent.

The another view of the attitudes formation is the biological approaches. The scientist believe that there are some genetic factors that contribute also to the formation of attitudes in nature. The best evidence is show the study of twins. A controlled twin studies in US and Sweden reveal that identical twins share more similar attitudes than fraternal twins. Genetic factors may influence general dispositions and conditionability that may influence formation of more specific attitudes.

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Baron, R.A., Branscombe, N.R(2012). Social Psychology. New Jersey. Pearson.

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117140.

Fidler, K., Messner, C., & Bluemke, M. (2006). Unresolved problems with the "I", the "A", and "T": A logical and psychometric critique of the Implicit Association Test(IAT). European Review of Social Psychology,17, 74-147.

Olson, M.A., & Kendrick, R.V. (2008). Origins of attitudes. In W.D.Crano& R.Prislin (Eds.), Attitudes and attitude change(pp.111-130). New York: Psychology Press.