Attitude Theory

Attitude has been a difficult concept to define adequately, primarily because it has been defined [Page 56]by so many, but also because of the word's differing lay uses and connotations. Since the early 1900s, a number of theories have been developed to provide a framework for the attitude-behavior relationship that would provide explanatory and predictive information. Research on attitudes has been consequently popular in many disciplines. A key historic root for the fascination with the term is found in psychology's interest in individual differences and the need for scientists to find a concept that could name and explain a consistency in individual behavior across a variety of situations.

More specifically, throughout the history of social psychology, the concept of attitude has played a major role in explaining human action, viewing attitudes as behavioral disposition. In fact, Gordon Allport, one of the founding figures of personality psychology, claimed 60 years ago that attitude probably is the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology. One of the earliest definitions of attitude was proposed in 1918 by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, who defined it as a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence on the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related. A more recent definition by Philip Zimbardo and Michael Leippe proclaims attitude as an evaluative disposition toward some object, based on cognitions, affective reactions, behavioral intentions, and past behaviors, that can influence cognitions, affective responses, and future intentions and behaviors. In short, attitudes are learned predispositions to respond—they serve to provide direction to subsequent actions.

The key issue for theories and explanatory models is the notion of the origin of attitudes. In other words, why do people have attitudes? By and large, research has proposed four main reasons. First, attitudes help organize and simplify a complex environment and thus facilitate understanding of the world around us. Second, attitudes protect our self-esteem by helping us to avoid unpleasant truths because they direct us to comingle with those who share our own worldviews. Third, attitudes make our environment more predictable as they trigger an existing repertory of reactions toward a set of attitude objects. This saves us from having to decide each time what the proper reaction or behavior should be. Finally, attitudes allow us to express some aspects of our individual personality or fundamental values.

Early studies seemed to confirm the validity of unidimensional effects of attitudes on behavior. Findings, however, such as the one by the social scientist Richard LaPiere's classic study, raised doubts about this assumption as it provided some evidence that people's verbal reports of their attitudes might not be very good predictors of their actual behavior. By the late 1950s, a multicomponent view was adopted, and attitudes were viewed as a complex system comprising a person's beliefs about an object, feelings toward the object, and action tendencies with respect to the object.

Modern cognitive psychology maintains that attitudes are the result of four components: (1) affective responses, (2) cognitive responses, (3) experiences of past behavior, and (4) behavioral intentions. The latter two are sometimes combined into a single component called behavior. The first component consists of a person's emotional response to a situation, object, or person (e.g., pleasure, anxiety). The second one is conceptualized as a person's factual knowledge of a situation, object, or person. The third component is related to how often a person had engaged in a certain behavior or been exposed to a certain situation or person in the past; that is, what kind of experience the person had collected about a situation, object, or person. The fourth component involves a person's plans to behave in a certain way when faced with a particular situation, even if these ideas are never acted on. These four components of attitude produce an organizing framework of the attitude construct known as cognitive schemata, which guide the information processes related to attention, interpretation, and recreation of a stimulus.

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