Attitude Formation



Attitude Formation

Introduction

An attitude is lasting and general negative or positive feeling or opinion regarding some issue, object, or person. Attitudes are formed by people through media or either persuasion of others or via direct experience. There are three foundations of attitudes: cognition, behavior, and emotion or affect. In addition to this, as suggested by evidence that attitude might get developed from genetics (biological foundations), social interactions (social foundations), and psychological needs (motivational foundations), although the first concept is controversial and new. Attitude is one of the central ideas of research and study within the area of social psychology (Vazire & Wilson, 2012; Petty & Cacioppo, 1981). This paper discusses the formation of attitudes, the functions they serve and the nature of attitude-behavior relationship in a holistic context.

Discussion

Behavioral Foundations:

At times people form attitudes through their actions. This could occur when they perform an action prior to having an attitude regarding that action, such as, going to an exhibition of arts/paintings of an artist whom they do not know, or when they are uncertain of their attitudes, such as, participating in a political rally with a friend, or when they are not thinking regarding what they are doing (unconsciously singing along to a random song on the T.V). To be precise, some moments in which a person is simple going along with the motion causes him or her to form attitude related to that moment. In the examples mentioned above, one might start to dislike the artists of the painting, support the motto of manifesto of that political party, or develop a taste for pop music playing on the T.V. as they got engaged to the behaviors, because of their actions that ended up in the formation of an attitude (Jolly, 2012; Bem, 1970). At a minimum of 4 lines of evidence, which give an explanation for the ways through which the attitudes might form from actions.

Firstly, the theory of self-perception proposes that people observe their behavior and understand their attitude, which relies on what they are doing or what they have done. Secondly, the theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people endeavor regularity between their actions and their attitudes, and at the point where the two do not match, they might develop a fresh attitude that coincides with their actions in the past (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993).

Thirdly, it has been discovered by the research findings (which used the facial feedback premise) that when a person holds his or her muscles (facial) in the pose of an emotion it causes the individual to experience a particular emotion that later on might color their beliefs. For instance, subjects that saw animated characters, which were not funny for the most part while placing a pen in their mouth across their teeth (which is a pose that stimulates the same muscled used while smiling) rated the animated characters funnier as compared to the subjects while placing a pen in their mouth across their teeth that stimulated the same muscles used while ...