Q: Define Attitude.
An
attitude is an expression of favor or disfavor toward a person, place,
thing, or event (the attitude object). Prominent psychologist Gordon
Allport once described attitudes "the most distinctive and
indispensable concept in contemporary social
psychology.".[1]
Attitude can be formed from a person's past and present.[2]
Attitude is also measurable and changeable as well as influencing the person's
emotion and behavior.
An attitude can be defined as a positive or negative
evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, ideas, or just about anything
in your environment, but there is debate about precise definitions. Eagly and
Chaiken, for example, define an attitude "a psychological tendency that is
expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or
disfavor.
Q: Explain the Function of Attitude
Daniel
Katz classified attitudes into four different groups based on their functions
- Utilitarian: provides us with general approach or avoidance
tendencies
- Knowledge: help people organize and interpret new
information
- Ego-defensive: attitudes can help people protect their
self-esteem
- Value-expressive: used to express central values or beliefs
1. Utilitarian People adopt attitudes that are rewarding and that help them avoid
punishment. In other words any attitude that is adopted in a person's own
self-interest is considered to serve a utilitarian function. Consider you have
a condo, people with condos pay property taxes, and as a result you don't want
to pay more taxes. If those factors lead to your attitude that " Increases
in property taxes are bad" you attitude is serving a utilitarian function.
2. Knowledge People need to maintain an organized, meaningful, and stable view of
the world. That being said important values and general principles can provide
a framework for our knowledge. Attitudes achieve this goal by making things fit
together and make sense. Example:
I believe that I am a good
person.
I believe that good things
happen to good people.
3. Ego-Defensive This function involves psychoanalytic principles
where people use defense mechanisms to protect themselves from psychological
harm. Mechanisms include:
1)
Denial, 2) Repression, 3) Projection, 4) Rationalization
The
ego-defensive notion correlates nicely with Downward Comparison Theory which
holds the view that derogating a less fortunate other increases our own
subjective well-being.
4. Value-Expressive
Serves to express one's
central values and self-concept.
Central values tend to
establish our identity and gain us social approval thereby showing us who we
are, and what we stand for.
An
example would concern attitudes toward a controversial political issue.
Q: Explain the Attitude Change
Attitudes can be
changed through persuasion and an important domain of research on attitude
change focuses on responses to communication. Experimental research into the
factors that can affect the persuasiveness of a message include:
Target
Characteristics: These are characteristics
that refer to the person who receives and processes a message. One such trait
is 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.
Source Characteristics: The major source characteristics are expertise,
trustworthiness and interpersonal attraction or
attractiveness. The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a
key variable here; if one reads a report about health and believes it came from
a professional medical journal, one may be more easily persuaded than if one
believes it is from a popular newspaper.
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.
When people are not motivated to process the message, simply the number of
arguments presented in a persuasive message will influence attitude change,
such that a greater number of arguments will produce greater attitude change.
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.