In psychology, attitude is a psychological construct that is a mental and emotional entity that inheres or characterizes a person, their attitude to approach to something, or their personal view on it. Attitude involves their mindset, outlook and feelings.[1] Attitudes are complex and are an acquired state through life experience. Attitude is an individual's predisposed state of mind regarding a value and it is precipitated through a responsive expression towards oneself,[2] a person, place, thing, or event (the attitude object) which in turn influences the individual's thought and action.
Most simply understood attitudes in psychology are the feelings individuals have about themselves and the world. Prominent psychologist Gordon Allport described this latent psychological construct as "the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology."Attitudes can be formed from a person's past and present.Key topics in the study of attitudes include attitude strength, attitude change, consumer behavior, and attitude-behavior relationships.
Attitude
In social psychology, an attitude is an evaluation of an object, ranging from extremely negative to extremely positive. An attitude can belong to both or either a conscious and unconscious mental state. [6] Most contemporary perspectives on attitudes permit that people can also be conflicted or ambivalent toward an object by simultaneously holding both positive and negative attitudes toward the same object. This has led to some discussion of whether an individual can hold multiple attitudes toward the same object.[7] Additionally, attitude can be defined as a set of emotions or beliefs towards a person, place or event.[8] Attitude can have many different variations of characteristics each one unique in different ways. Researchers suggest that some attitudes are inherited via genetic transmission from our parents.[9]Attitude can also be referred to evaluations in terms of a preference for or against an object. This is commonly in terms such as like, dislike, prefer or hate. When individuals express their attitudes such as "I like to go hiking," or "I hate bugs," individuals are expressing the relationship between the object and oneself and this can be identified as either positive or negative. Attitudes are an important part of how we perceive our behaviors and unique characteristics. Likewise, attitudes can have a profound effect on a person's behavior.
An attitude can be a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, events, activities, and ideas. Several researchers[10] agree that attitude can be described as a settled and unchanging way of thinking, feeling, or observing people, places, events, or objects. It can be about something which is concrete or abstract. However, there is a debate about precise definitions. "In psychotherapy and counseling, the client's feeling of rejection or disapproval of the therapist or counselor."[11] When an individual chooses to respond positively to a situation, they tend to assess situations in a more positive manner and they recognize that they cannot change the past. However, decisions made in the future can impact what happens next. These individuals tend to pay attention to the good in situations rather than the bad. As for an individual with a negative attitude they are more likely to respond to a situation negatively and they tend to look back on a problem. They become so engulfed on the problem they cannot move forward from it. These individuals tend to have a hard time finding the good in situations or event, ignore the good, and focus on the bad in people and in situations. Eagly and Chaiken, for example, define an attitude as "a psychological tendency
that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor."[12] Though it is sometimes common to define an attitude as affect toward an object, affect (i.e., discrete emotions or overall arousal) is generally understood as an evaluative structure used to form an attitude object.[13] Attitude may influence the attention to attitude objects, the use of categories for encoding information and the interpretation, judgement and recall of attitude-relevant information.[14] These influences tend to be more powerful for strong attitudes which are accessible and based on elaborate supportive knowledge structure. The durability and impact of influence depend upon the strength formed from the consistency of heuristics.[14] Attitudes can guide encoding information, attention and behaviors, even if the individual is pursuing unrelated goals.