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2.4 Attitudes
2.4.1 Definition of Attitudes
Attitude is an emotion that all people get when they have other emotions. Attitudes are positive, negative or neutral views of an “attitude object”: i.e. a
person, behavior or event. People can also “ambivalent” towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative bias towards the
attitude in question. Attitudes come from judgments. An attitude is a persons organized tendency to think, feel, and act in certain
general way to some aspects of his social environment or in response to a given class of objects. Attitudes are broad viewpoints that can be identified, at least to
some extent, by the consistencies displayed in thoughts, feelings, and overt behavior Fantino and Reynolds, 1975: 426. Attitudes, then, are a complex
collection of predisposition to think, respond, and behave in certain ways. They are extremely important area of study for the psychologists because of their
influence in shaping an individuals perceptions, expectations, belief, and behaviors – that is, in shaping all of his responses to the variants events, objects,
people, and issues in his world. According to Kuppuswamy 1973: 106, an attitude is an enduring system
that includes a cognitive component, a feeling component and an action tendency. Attitudes involve an emotional component. This is why when an attitude is
formed it becomes resistant to change; it does not generally respond to new facts. An attitude involves belief as well as evaluations. These attitudes involve some
knowledge about other groups the cognitive component, some feelings of dislike
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the affective, evaluational component and a predisposition to avoid, attack, etc. the action component. Thus attitudes give some consistencies to our thinking
about social objects as well as our feelings toward them. People also tend to act consistently as a result of these consistent belief and feelings.
Attitudes are derived primarily from social influences. From birth, the human being is enmeshed in social institutions which constitute his environment
in the same sense as the physical world. The home, being the primary social unit, has a great influence on the formation of ones attitudes. This is also the reason
why attitudes give a consistency to our responses to persons, groups, and other social objects.
2.4.2 Attitude Change
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