What are the attitudes? We usually talk about positive or negative attitudes, good or bad, however, even in social psychology there is no consensus in the definition of this concept, they go beyond being negative or positive and have different components whose relationship is ambiguous.
In general, it can be said that attitudes are assessments that have a function: acquiring knowledge, so when we meet a new person the first thing we are going to do is evaluate it and develop an attitude towards it.
- In other words.
- Let’s judge that person.
- The information of this judgment will allow us to simplify and structure the world.
- So attitudes can be understood as a social knowledge built on experiences.
- Beliefs and feelings.
Attitudes have three components, which are beliefs, feelings and behaviors, these three components are understood as the answers that can be given to the stimuli that provoke attitudes, remembering the example of the previous paragraphs, if a person awakens in us a positive attitude, will generate positive feelings, such as happiness, when we meet again.
These three components refer to cognitive, emotional and behavioral. For example, a well-known distinction is stereotype (cognitive component), prejudice (emotional or emotional component), and discrimination (behavioral component).
From these three components arises the tripartite model of attitudes, according to this model attitudes are what we feel, what we think and the propensity to act that we adopt; however, other models tell us that attitudes include beliefs. would be given for what we thought.
“When we remember some of the people we love, sometimes we don’t make any difference between what they were to us and what we wanted them to be. “
Another point on which there is no consensus is the relationship between attitude and behavior. Those who claim that attitudes have all three components, cognitive, emotional and behavioral, experience a problem when beliefs and behaviors do not match.
In many situations we do not behave according to what we believe, for example, we have a very positive opinion of a person, but when he asks us for help, we do not help.
One of the solutions to this gap between beliefs and behaviors lies in emotions, what we feel will be what unieshing what we believe and what we do, so if we think a person is very positive, we will help them as long as positive emotions are generated when they ask us for help.
Another solution uses past behaviors as a reference. Therefore, the behaviors in the present will be the same as in the past. Therefore, we will only help the person if, when he asks for help, we have already helped them. Otherwise, we won’t help you.
“There’s always something in our lives that we wish we hadn’t done. But it’s done, and all we can do is take the most favorable consequences of this mistake?-Hugo Betti-
There are also ways to treat them as unitary, i. e. not to take into account the three elements mentioned above when thinking about attitudes, so a unitary definition tells us that attitudes are an evacuation arrangement to respond to an objective or event in a favorable or unfavourable way. In this way, the three components would be three ways in which attitude would be expressed observably.
Finally, the definition of attitudes is not simple. However, here we leave you one of the most used: attitudes are categorizations of a stimulus produced by an object in an evaluative dimension based, or generated, by three types of information: cognitive, affective / emotional and / or related to past behaviors or behaviors. Intentions.