Attitude on social psychology

Attitude can be defined as a positive or negative feeling we hold towards a given object, this may include our opinion or thoughts about anything and these are expressed towards the ways we respond to things. Attitude can also be described as a learned predisposition to response in a consistently favourable or unfavourable manner with respect to a given object. From this definition, their are three keywords I.e. that attitude is learned, that it predisposes actions, and such actions are consistently favourable or unfavourable toward a given object. Attitude is viewed as a latent or underlying variable that is assumed to be guide or influence behaviour.
Attitude are learned and relative permanent. They give direction to our behaviour. Attitude have components such as beliefs, feelings and tendency to behave in a particular way. Our attitudes are learned, we do not come into the world with them and it remains with us for a long period.

The components of an attitude:
Attitude are widely held to have three components, cognitive, effective and behavioural. An individual's responses to an object may be of three kinds.

• Cognitive responses e.g. perceptions of something or reports of beliefs for example "QN airport nearby is noisy and will cause danger".

• Affective responses - Feeling or motivations, prompted by the object. For example " an airport nearby will cause me anxiety and I hate it.

• Behavioural or donative responses: Behavioural responses relating to an object, or else behavioural intentions. For example intend to lobby Parliament to prevent this airport being constructed here:

Attitude Formation:
Many theories have been used to explain how attitudes are formed or developed. Attitude seems to be learned predisposition to behave In a particular way towards an object or a person, but there is some debate about the way in which the learning take place.

• Learning theory By learning theory attitudes are learned just as we learn every other things. We learn new feelings or information through the processes of association and reinforcement.
  Association: This occurs when two or more stimuli appear at the same time and at the same place we try to associate both stimuli for example we associate dark places with danger, thus we tend to fear dark place or people wearing dark clothes.
  Imitation: Attitudes can also be formed by mere observating model for example children can learn from their peers, parents and personal experiences.
  Reinforcement: Attitude can also be formed through rewards and punishment, punishment makes us to change our behaviour while, reward makes learning to be repeated.