Do Attitudes Predict Behavior? Essay

Attitudes can also arise due to observational learning, wherein people internalize the attitudes of others; passing them on from one individual to the other. Attitudes can be held implicitly and do not innately imply behavior. Often individual’s will have consideration of a ground or opinion but not act on it when the chance rises. Many factors influence whether or not attitudes will come to impact behavior.

While many people may believe that learning is just a natural response that all animals are capable of, there is actually a more complex explanation on how we learn the things we do in order to survive in the world. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning are both basic forms of learning, they have the word conditioning in common. Conditioning is the acquisition of specific patterns of behavior in the presence of well-defined stimuli.

Attitude - Attitude toward a behavior is referred as an individual’s positive and negative evaluation of a relevant behavior and is composed of an individual’s salient beliefs regarding the perceived consequences of performing behavior (Ajzen, 1991, p.207).

Learning is the act of changing an organism’s behavior in response to an experience. Associative learning is when an organism links two events that occur close in time. When an organism learns to make associations, it is being conditioned. There are two types of conditioning. Operant conditioning is when an organism associates an action and the consequence of that action. It results in the organism adapting its behavior to maximize rewards and minimize punishment (Skinner). On the other hand, classical conditioning is a type of learning where an organism associates a certain stimulus and the response to it with a different stimulus. A neutral stimulus is associated with an unconditioned response to an unconditioned

Social psychologists employ a variety of different measures in attempt to measure attitudes, which cannot be directly measured due to their hypothetical and unobservable nature. However, they are often inferable from behaviour. For example, a negative attitude towards smoking might be reflected in moving away from someone who lights up in your vicinity (behaviour). Attitudes measures can be explicit (i.e. participant is asked directly about their attitude towards an object – e.g. opinion poll), or implicit (i.e. measure wherein participants sub-conscious attitudes are assessed without their knowledge – e.g…) (Haddock and Maio, 2008). Questionnaires are the most common measure of attitudes, utilising one of four types of attitude measurement scales.

There are many different kinds of ways that people and animals learn. People can adjust the way they learn to the different situations in which they are learning and what they have to learn. One form of learning is known as conditioning. Conditioning emphasises the relationship between stimuli and responses. The two types of conditioning found are Classical conditioning and Operant conditioning. Learning may occur in different ways. Psychologists have distinguished between different types of learning, these being Observational Learning and Insight Learning.

An attitude are the long lasting beliefs, feelings, and behavioral responses towards social objects such as other people or issues (Attitudes and Behavior, n.d.). Attitudes can either be positive or negative.

Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) define attitudes as a person’s feelings of favorableness or un-favorableness regarding performing the behavior. Attitude formation results from the summation of salient behavioral beliefs regarding a behavior, as well as the strength of each individual belief (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). Salient beliefs are those beliefs that are easily accessible and activated spontaneously when confronted with the target object or situation. These beliefs often center on the expected outcomes of performing the behavior, as well as the evaluation of these outcomes, a concept that has been termed the expectancy-value approach (Ajzen, 2006). When individuals perceive performing the behavior as resulting in more positive outcomes than negative

“Attitudes are positive or negative evaluations, feeling, and tendencies that individuals harbor toward objects or concepts” (Wild). As the book mentions, attitudes are similar to values, these are formed according to a culture background and varies from country to country.

Attitude–a relatively constant feeling, predisposition, or a set of beliefs that is directed toward an object, a person, or a situation.

Attitudes are thoughts that you have accepted as true and that lead you to think, feel, or act positively or negatively toward a person, idea or event. They represent an emotional readiness to behave in a particular manner. (Reece) Positive and negative attitudes affect how you work and how you influence other people around you. These attitudes can absolutely be changed though because we are not born with those attitudes. We form them as time passes, depending on the situations that we have been through. For instance, if you had a job where your supervisor was racist toward you, you would begin to form a negative attitude about supervisors thinking that all of them are going to be racist. Instead, you can change your attitude by thinking that not everyone acts the same way. A positive attitude can make a difference between an amazing life and a nonsense one. Therefore, a lot of people should try to change their attitude to a positive one.

Learning theories are the structural foundation used to label how information is processed, stored and encoded during learning. Retention of knowledge is subjective and influenced by outside factors such as, an individual’s cognitive ability to process or retain information. Other influences are environmental, emotional or preexisting experiences or associations (Andreassi, 2000). To gain a better understanding of behaviorism in correlation to learning theories it is crucial to understand and grasp the meaning of associative learning. This process involves the association between two stimuli or a behavior and a learned stimulus. Associative learning is divided in to two central techniques, classical conditioning and operant condition. Classical and operant conditioning are basic methods of learning and conditioning is used to adapt a behavior or association through a stimuli or consequence (Ciccarelli, 2012). While classical conditioning and operant conditioning are key elements in associative learning, they have significant differences. A clear contrast between the two theories is whether the behavior or response produced is considered to be voluntary or involuntary.

Attitudes carry a huge weight in social psychology. In the past, the theory of attitudes was considered the most dominant study in social psychology (Allport, 1935). Throughout time, the term attitude has accumulated many definitions, a renowned definition being “a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols” (Hogg and Vaughan, 2014, p. 150). The focus on attitudes is so significant because the question of whether attitudes can predict behaviour has arisen time after time. If attitudes do predict behaviour, we can discover why people act in certain ways and, therefore, attempt to change negative behaviours. Over time, work has been carried out to determine to what extent attitudes predict behaviour.

Maintaining a positive attitude all through life impacts one's social status, physical health, and long term success. Many people only want to hangout with others that have good attitudes. They also enjoy being in the presence of others who have the ability to lift them up when they are down. Having a good attitude shows a person’s character in a positive way. A good attitude is the start to a good future, and a lot of success. Positive attitudes create a lot of wonderful opportunities in and outside of the workforce. Overall, a good personal character will create an easier route to achieve difficult goals and tasks causing a more trustworthy person to be created.

The positive or negative mentality and neural readiness towards an event, thing, place or person are what attitudes represent. The affective component is the emotional response a person has towards an attitude object. Throughout the day a person may find themselves feeling a wide range of emotions like sad or happy, embarrassed or proud, envious or comfortable. An unregulated affect can become dangerous to a person’s health, however, normally our affective experiences allow us to function properly in situation and aid in our chances of survival. People’s affective responses signal to them that things are well or not well depending on whether they are in a good mood or not. The affect people experience may also contribute to how one engages in particular behaviors; if a person is experiencing a positive affect,