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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 as "the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology,"  and as "a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive and dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related.” Attitude can be formed from a person's past and present.

Definitions of attitude
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." 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 to be distinct from attitude as a measure of favorability. There has been other findings and support of of the complete opposite definition that are described by the "tripartite model." This states that attitude can be based on affective, and behavioral information/responses.

Attitude is also measurable and changeable as well as influencing the person's emotion and behavior. Attitudes are heavily researched because it is thought to be predictive of behavior. Many researchers have conducted many different theories and models on attitudes due to their interest in the ways attitudes are formed and changed. Researchers are also interested in finding out the processes to which attitudes have a direct affect on behavior.

This definition of attitude allows for one's evaluation of an attitude object to vary from extremely negative to extremely positive, but also admits that people can also be conflicted or ambivalent toward an object meaning that they might at different times express both positive and negative attitude toward the same object. This has led to some discussion of whether individual can hold multiple attitudes toward the same object. Krech and Crutchfield (1948) wrote, "An attitude can be defined as an enduring organization of motivational, emotional, perceptual, and cognitive processes with respect to some aspect of the individual's world.”

Whether attitudes are explicit (i.e., deliberately formed) versus implicit (i.e., subconscious) has been a topic of considerable research. Research on implicit attitudes, which are generally unacknowledged or outside of awareness, uses sophisticated methods involving people's response times to stimuli to show that implicit attitudes exist (perhaps in tandem with explicit attitudes of the same object). Implicit and explicit attitudes seem to affect people's behavior, though 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.

Jung's definition
Attitude is one of Jung's 57 definitions in Chapter XI of Psychological Types. Jung's definition of attitude is a "readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way" (Jung, [1921] 1971:par. 687). Attitudes very often come in pairs, one conscious and the other unconscious. Within this broad definition Jung defines several attitudes.

The main (but not only) attitude dualities that Jung defines are the following.
 * Consciousness and the unconscious. The "presence of two attitudes is extremely frequent, one conscious and the other unconscious. This means that consciousness has a constellation of contents different from that of the unconscious, a duality particularly evident in neurosis" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 687).
 * Extraversion and introversion. This pair is so elementary to Jung's theory of types that he labeled them the "attitude-types".
 * Rational and irrational attitudes. "I conceive reason as an attitude" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 785).
 * The rational attitude subdivides into the thinking and feeling psychological functions, each with its attitude.
 * The irrational attitude subdivides into the sensing and intuition psychological functions, each with its attitude. "There is thus a typical thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuitive attitude" (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 691).
 * Individual and social attitudes. Many of the latter are "isms".

In addition, Jung discusses the abstract attitude. “When I take an abstract attitude...” (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 679). Abstraction is contrasted with creationism. “CREATIONISM. By this I mean a peculiarity of thinking and feeling which is the antithesis of abstraction” (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 696). For example: "I hate his attitude for being Sarcastic."

Measuring attitudes
Many measurements and scales are used to examine attitudes. Attitudes can be difficult to measure because measurement is arbitrary, meaning people have to give attitudes a scale to measure it against, and attitudes are ultimately a hypothetical construct that cannot be observed directly. Self-report measures are often affected by the influences of social desirability and self-presentation. The results of self-report measures seem limited due to the fact that we tend to be inaccurate and unaware with our own true attitudes and that our attitudes stem off of our unconscious thoughts.

Explicit Measurements Explicit measures tend to rely on self-reports or easily observed behaviors. These tend to involve bipolar scales (e.g., good-bad, favorable-unfavorable, support-oppose, etc.). Explicit measures can also be used by measuring the straightforward attribution of characteristics to nominate groups, such as "I feel that baptists are....?" or "I think that men are...?" Likert scales and other self-reports are also commonly used. Due to the fact that explicit attitudes are conscious to the person and can be seen to others, self-reporting and observation are the most used methods to measure explicit attitudes. The data is easily accessible but doesn't leave us with one's true attitude. For example, although self-reporting seems to be mostly accurate, we must take into consideration that each participant might not be highly self-aware or honest.

Implicit Measurements Implicit measures are not consciously directed and are assumed to be automatic, which may make implicit measures more valid and reliable than explicit measures (such as self-reports). For example, people can be motivated such that they find it socially desirable to appear to have certain attitudes. An example of this is that people can hold implicit prejudicial attitudes, but express explicit attitudes that report little prejudice. Implicit measures help account for these situations and look at attitudes that a person may not be aware of or want to show. Also, one's verbal report of their attitude can be completely different then the behavior that corresponds with that attitude. For instance, someone could have a negative attitude towards the health effects of cigarettes but their behavior could tell us something different because they still smoke cigarettes. Implicit measures therefore usually rely on an indirect measure of attitude. For example, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) examines the strength between the target concept and an attribute element by considering the latency in which a person can examine two response keys when each has two meanings. With little time to carefully examine what the participant is doing they respond according to internal keys. This priming can show attitudes the person has about a particular object.

Attitude structure
Despite debate about the particular structure of attitudes, there is considerable evidence that attitudes reflect more than evaluations of a particular object that vary from positive to negative. Attitudes also have other characteristics, such as importance, certainty, or accessibility (measures of attitude strength) and associated knowledge.

There is also considerable interest in inter-attitudinal structure, which connects different attitudes to one another and to more underlying psychological structures, such as values or ideology.

There are three components that support the structure of attitudes: Affective, Behavioral, Cognitive. A person’s actual feelings and emotions that go with a particular event/person/object is the affective component. For instance, when one is afraid of snakes, the actual fear that accompanies the object is a big contributor to the overall attitude of the snake. The Behavioral component is the way a person reacts/ behaves in response to their attitude of the particular object. For instance, one will scream when encountering a snake due to their fear of snakes. The Cognitive component is the person’s own knowledge and beliefs about a particular object that could have came from past experiences. For instance the person can believe that the snakes are harmful as supporting their negative attitude towards snakes. The three components are usually all linked together but some argue that there are many other factors influencing the behavioral component.

The classic, tripartite view offered by William J. McGuire is that an attitude contains cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. However there are many arguments and disagreements against this "theory" of attitude structure. A criticism of the tripartite view of attitudes is that it requires cognitive, affective, and behavioral associations of an attitude to be consistent, but this may be implausible. Thus some views of attitude structure see the cognitive and behavioral components as derivative of affect or affect and behavior as derivative of underlying beliefs.

Attitude function
Another classic view of attitudes is that attitudes serve particular functions for individuals. That is, researchers have tried to understand why individuals hold particular attitudes or why they hold attitudes in general by considering how attitudes affect the individuals who hold them. Daniel Katz, for example, writes that attitudes can serve "instrumental, adjustive or utilitarian," "ego-defensive," "value-expressive," or "knowledge" functions. The functional view of attitudes suggests that in order for attitudes to change (e.g., via persuasion), appeals must be made to the function(s) that a particular attitude serves for the individual. As an example, the "ego-defensive" function might be used to influence the racially prejudicial attitudes of an individual who sees themselves as open-minded and tolerant. By appealing to that individual's image of themselves as tolerant and open-minded, it may be possible to change their prejudicial attitudes to be more consistent with their self-concept. Similarly, a persuasive message that threatens self-image is much more likely to be rejected.

Daniel Katz classified attitudes into four different groups based on their functions


 * 1) Utilitarian: provides us with general approach or avoidance tendencies
 * 2) Knowledge: help people organize and interpret new information
 * 3) Ego-defensive: attitudes can help people protect their self-esteem
 * 4) Value-expressive: used to express central values or beliefs

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.

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.
 * Something bad happens to Bob.
 * So I believe Bob must not be a good person.

Ego-Defensive This function involves psychoanalytic principles where people use defense mechanisms to protect themselves from psychological harm. Mechanisms include:
 * Denial
 * Repression
 * Projection
 * 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. We are more likely to use the ego-defensive function when we suffer a frustration or misfortune.

Value-Expressive An example would concern attitudes toward a controversial political issue.
 * 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.

Attitude formation
According to Doob (1947), learning can account for most of the attitudes we hold. The study of attitude formation is the study of how people form evaluations of persons, places or things. Theories of classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning and social learning are mainly responsible for formation of attitude. Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience. In addition, exposure to the 'attitude' objects may have an effect on how a person forms his or her attitude. This concept was seen as the "Mere-Exposure Effect". Robert Zajonc showed that people were more likely to have a positive attitude on 'attitude objects' when they were exposed to it frequently than if they were not. Mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his atitude toward it. Tesser (1993) has argued that hereditary variables may affect attitudes - but believes that they may do so indirectly. For example, consistency theories, which imply that we must be consistent in our beliefs and values. As with any type of heritability, to determine if a particular trait has a basis in our genes, twin studies are used. The most famous example of such a theory is Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger, which explains that when the components of an attitude (including belief and behavior) are at odds an individual may adjust one to match the other (for example, adjusting a belief to match a behavior). Other theories include balance theory, originally proposed by Heider (1958), and the self-perception theory, originally proposed by Daryl Bem.

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:


 * 1) 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. Although it is sometimes thought that those higher in self-esteem are less easily persuaded, there is some evidence that the relationship between self-esteem and persuasibility is actually curvilinear, with people of moderate self-esteem being more easily persuaded than both those of high and low self-esteem levels (Rhodes & Woods, 1992). The mind frame and mood of the target also plays a role in this process.
 * 2) 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. Some psychologists have debated whether this is a long-lasting effect and Hovland and Weiss (1951) found the effect of telling people that a message came from a credible source disappeared after several weeks (the so-called "sleeper effect"). Whether there is a sleeper effect is controversial. Perceived wisdom is that if people are informed of the source of a message before hearing it, there is less likelihood of a sleeper effect than if they are told a message and then told its source.
 * 3) 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.
 * 4) 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. This is commonly seen in modern advertisements that feature celebrities. In some cases, physician, doctors or experts are used. In other cases film stars are used for their attractiveness.

Emotion and attitude change
Emotion is a common component in persuasion, social influence, and attitude change. Much of attitude research emphasized the importance of affective or emotion components. Emotion works hand-in-hand with the cognitive process, or the way we think, about an issue or situation. Emotional appeals are commonly found in advertising, health campaigns and political messages. Recent examples include no-smoking health campaigns and political campaign advertising emphasizing the fear of terrorism. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of cognitive, affective and conative components. Attitudes are part of the brain’s associative networks, the spider-like structures residing in long term memory that consist of affective and cognitive nodes.

By activating an affective or emotion node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined. In primarily affective networks, it is more difficult to produce cognitive counterarguments in the resistance to persuasion and attitude change.

Affective forecasting, otherwise known as intuition or the prediction of emotion, also impacts attitude change. Research suggests that predicting emotions is an important component of decision making, in addition to the cognitive processes. How we feel about an outcome may override purely cognitive rationales.

In terms of research methodology, the challenge for researchers is measuring emotion and subsequent impacts on attitude. Since we cannot see into the brain, various models and measurement tools have been constructed to obtain emotion and attitude information. Measures may include the use of physiological cues like facial expressions, vocal changes, and other body rate measures. For instance, fear is associated with raised eyebrows, increased heart rate and increase body tension (Dillard, 1994). Other methods include concept or network mapping, and using primes or word cues in the era.

Components of emotion appeals
Any discrete emotion can be used in a persuasive appeal; this may include jealousy, disgust, indignation, fear, blue, disturbed, haunted,and anger. Fear is one of the most studied emotional appeals in communication and social influence research.

Important consequences of fear appeals and other emotion appeals include the possibility of reactance which may lead to either message rejections or source rejection and the absence of attitude change. As the EPPM suggests, there is an optimal emotion level in motivating attitude change. If there is not enough motivation, an attitude will not change; if the emotional appeal is overdone, the motivation can be paralyzed thereby preventing attitude change.

Emotions perceived as negative or containing threat are often studied more than perceived positive emotions like humor. Though the inner-workings of humor are not agreed upon, humor appeals may work by creating incongruities in the mind. Recent research has looked at the impact of humor on the processing of political messages. While evidence is inconclusive, there appears to be potential for targeted attitude change is receivers with low political message involvement.

Important factors that influence the impact of emotion appeals include self efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features. Self efficacy is a perception of one’s own human agency; in other words, it is the perception of our own ability to deal with a situation. It is an important variable in emotion appeal messages because it dictates a person’s ability to deal with both the emotion and the situation. For example, if a person is not self-efficacious about their ability to impact the global environment, they are not likely to change their attitude or behavior about global warming.

Dillard (1994) suggests that message features such as source non-verbal communication, message content, and receiver differences can impact the emotion impact of fear appeals. The characteristics of a message are important because one message can elicit different levels of emotion for different people. Thus, in terms of emotion appeals messages, one size does not fit all.

Attitude accessibility refers to the activation of an attitude from memory in other words, how readily available is an attitude about an object, issue, or situation. Issue involvement is the relevance and salience of an issue or situation to an individual. Issue involvement has been correlated with both attitude access and attitude strength. Past studies conclude accessible attitudes are more resistant to change.

Attitude-behavior relationship
There has been historical controversy of attitudes having a big influence on behavior. Wicker conducted reviews of many studies supporting this phenomenon and concluded, “Taken as a whole, these studies suggest that it is considerably more likely that attitudes will be unrelated or only slightly related to overt behaviors than that attitudes will be closely related to actions. Product-moment correlation coefficients relating the two kinds of responses are rarely above .30, and often are near zero.” Using this as his supporting evidence, he had deep uncertainty on the connection between attitudes and behaviors. Due to Wicker’s conclusions on such inconsistency on the subject, many psychologists and sociologists wanted to challenge these findings, which led them to do some heavy research on attitudes.

The Theory of Reasoned Action is the idea that behavior is determined by the actual behavioral intention to emit the behavior. Behavioral intention refers to the motivational factors that influence a given behavior where the stronger the intention to perform the behavior the more likely the behavior will be performed. . Two influences that determine the behavioral intentions are personal/ “attitudinal factors” and social/“normative” factors. The personal/ “attitudinal” factors (person’s attitude toward a specific behavior) include the most important beliefs one has of a particular situation and the perceived consequences that could occur once a behavior is made as well as their own evaluations and outcomes of these consequences. The social/ “normative” factors include the person’s perceptions of how they think others expect them to behave. All these factors that determine in the intention vary according to individual differences, behavior, and the situation.

The Theory of Planned Behavior was introduced later to predict an individual’s intention to engage in a behavior at a certain time and place. The Behavioral component of this model is greatly dependent on the motivation/intention as well as the ability/control of others. This theory is different from the theory of reasoned action because it includes the explanation of a person’ the ability to exert self-control comes into play. Self-control depends on the perceived power as well as the perceived behavioral control. Perceived power refers to the perception of the introduced factors that may cause or diminish a performance of a behavior. Perceived behavioral control refers to a person’s perception of hour difficult it is to perform the intended behavior, which depends heavily on specific situations. Although this model explains more than the theory of reasoned action, it still has it’s limitations. .

An alternative model, called MODE for "Motivation and Opportunity as Determinants" was proposed by Russell H. Fazio, which focuses on motivations and opportunities for deliberative attitude-related behavior to occur. MODE is a Dual process theory that expects deliberative attitude-behavior linkages - like those modeled by the theory of planned behavior - only occur when individuals have motivation to reflect upon their own attitudes. . The MODE Model is another way of explaining one’s positive or negative evaluation of an object or just simply one’s attitude. It correlates an individual’s memory of an object as well as their evolution of it. Many attitudes can be easily available from simply having a perception cause one to have an object-evaluation association and therefore give a correlating response. For instance, when in sight of a cigarette, an immediate crave for one develops. Overall this type of model describes the way that attitudes can lead us to behave in an impulsive way, without the awareness and consideration of the attitude and without the consciousness of its influence. Memory is importantly involved where our associations we make with objects drives the attitude that was previously formed. Aside from the other previous models, the MODE model explains that attitudes are both explicit and implicit.

Aside from the many models that are attempting to support and find evidence on attitude structure, the main focus is that when attitudes correspond to a specific behavior, it is more predictive than attitudes that are more general. As supported in the models explained above, there are many other factors aside from simply "attitudes" that influence people's behavioral intentions such as subjective norms and perceived behavioral control.