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Attitude Survey

Attitude Survey

Introduction to 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, behavior 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 are composed from various forms of 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.

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, thought 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,...