Attitudes are the combination complex of things we usually call personality, beliefs, values, behaviors and motivations. All people, regardless of status or intelligence, have attitudes. Attitude exists in the mind of each person. It helps define our identity, guide our actions, and influence how we judge people. Although the feeling and belief components of attitude are internal to a person, we can see a person’s attitude from his or her behavior. Attitude helps us define how we see life situations, as well as define how we behave. One of the characteristics of attitudes is to provide internal cognitions or beliefs and thoughts about people and objects. The attitude Explicit is one in which we are conscious, the implicit attitude is unconscious, but still has an effect on our behaviors.
Attitudinal bipolarity
Any attitude rests on the existence of an attitudinal continuum. In fact, the main measurement techniques (Thustone and semantic differential) adopt this assumption.
However, some very significant attitudes (political attitudes, towards abortion or towards the use of nuclear energy), do not seem to be unidimensional Þ It poses problems when conceptualizing and measuring them and, consequently, jeopardizes the possibility of adequately understanding its dynamics and operation.
From the acceptance of the assumption of unidimensionality, a series of implications are derived: The first in this case is that these 2 political positions are contradictory and opposite.
Kerlinger investigated this problem and came to the conclusion that this political attitude is not one-dimensional:
- The liberals They do not oppose conservative postulates, they do not evaluate them negatively but rather neutrally (midpoint of the continuum). Conservatives do the same with liberal ideology.
- Liberal or conservative people do so based on a series of positive references (liberal: freedom, tolerance and equality. Conservative: maintenance of the status quo, religion, private property). These referents are “criterial” (they serve the person to orient themselves socially and establish their social position in relation to others). Contrary to what could be predicted from the assumption of unidimensionality, there are no negative criterial references.
Kristiansen and Zanna, studying attitudes toward abortion and toward the use of nuclear energy, found similar results.
Kerlinger’s general conclusion: In those attitudes in people that have only or predominantly positive criterion referents, the idea of unidimensionality and attitudinal bipolarity cannot be maintained.
Two reasons:
- The person may not be familiar with those values that are opposite to those they hold, so they are irrelevant to them.
- As a defensive mechanism for their own beliefs and values, the person denies relevance to opposing values in order to better protect their own.
The consistency of attitudes
The attitude It can be expressed in 3 different ways (cognitive, affective and behavioral). We would have to hope that these 3 ways would work at the same time. If this were the case, we would have to conclude that there is attitudinal consistency. However, this is not always the case, because many attitudes originate in affective experiences or in behavioral exchanges of the person with the attitudinal object, that is, not all attitudes arise from precise, detailed and considered knowledge of the object. The person develops attitudes whose strength and stability do not depend on his or her beliefs about the object, but on the affective load of the object for him or her, or on a high level of familiarity. There would be evaluative-cognitive inconsistency.
Evaluative-cognitive consistency It occurs between the global evaluation of the attitude object and the resulting evaluation of the set of beliefs. Fieshbein and Ajzen, in the theory of reasoned action, found high correlations between these two measures (the direct measure of the global attitudinal evaluation and the sum of subjective probability x subjective desirability products of salient beliefs). However, even in the most favorable case, there was room for inconsistency (only a correlation of r=1 would speak of perfect consistency). The sources of this type of inconsistency can be two:
- The existence of beliefs that do not harmonize with the global evaluation (the attitude, rather than a cognitive origin, has an affective or behavioral origin).
- The lack of beliefs about the attitude object, which prevent the attitude from being well defined. Concept of non-attitude: People do not develop attitudes towards objects to which they do not pay attention or with which they do not have any type of contact.
The consequences of evaluative-cognitive consistency of the attitude have to do with its instability. Inconsistent attitudes do not fulfill well the fundamental function of attitude, which is to guide the person in his or her social world. Two studies explain why this is so. Both show the greatest stability of consistent attitudes:
- Chaiken and Yates: People with consistent attitudes better handle information that contradicts their attitude.
- Chaiken and Baldwin: The beliefs of people with higher consistency maintained higher intensity correlations with each other.
Attitudinal ambivalence
Cognitive ambivalence can occur:
- In the cognitive component of the attitude: When the beliefs about the object of the attitude are inconsistent with each other (smokers).
- In the affective component of the attitude: Existence of mixed or mixed feelings in relation to the attitudinal object (attitude towards many political leaders, respected as well as feared).
In summary, ambivalence is a special case of inconsistency, that which takes place between beliefs (cognitive) or between affects (affective).
Focusing on beliefs and under the assumption that an ambivalent attitudinal object includes positive and negative characteristics, Kaplan proposed a procedure to measure attitudinal ambivalence in the cognitive component: Assess positive and negative characteristics separately. The traditional semantic differential would use the entire continuum for measurement:
My coworker is
-3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3
Incapable—————— Capable
Kaplan proposes 2 separate unipolar measures:
My coworker is
Able…. 0 +1 +2 +3
Incapable 0 -1 -2 -3
There will be ambivalence Yeah:
- The evaluation of the two characteristics is very polarized, it is very extreme (The person feels both a strong attraction and a strong rejection towards the attitudinal object).
- The evaluation is very equal in terms of its absolute value although it is not very extreme (At the same time as feeling attraction, you also feel rejection).
Ambivalence makes attitudes tend to be unstable and affects the relationship they maintain with behavior. The context can influence these attitudes in a very striking way by making the positive characteristics more salient in some cases and the negative ones in others.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.