How Culture Influences The Development Of Attitudes

“Culture encompasses the behavior patterns, beliefs, and all other products of a particular group of people that are passed on from generation to generation” (Santrock).

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.

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).

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

Culture, the way we learn, think, live, eat and how we present our selves to the world. On daily bases we are representing who we are and how we positively or negatively view others in the world. Your location can determine whether your views are accepted negatively or positively. The motivational quote found in my English classroom, “What is popular is not always right. What is right is not always popular.

In line with the then predominant three-component view of attitude (e. g. , Chein, 1951 ; Krech & Crutchfield, 1948), Harding and colleagues (1954, 1969) assume that the responses that express evaluation can be divided into three classes:

Psychologists in both the cognitive and discursive field believe that attitudes are central to our understanding of human behaviour yet they differ in their definition of the concept. The cognitive approach builds upon a very operational understanding of attitudes, defining them as an “inner cognitive states” whereby a person may generate favourable or unfavourable thoughts and/or feelings towards a person, idea

This essay will examine the strength of the link between attitudes and behaviour and show that attitudes do not always predict behaviour as there are a number of variables that need to be put in place before the evaluation of a person behaving according to their attitudes can be assessed. These variables will be discussed in some detail. The three component model will be discussed and also attitude formation will be touched upon, before the link between behaviour and attitude can be examined a general understanding of how and why attitudes are formed needs to be addressed.

Social psychologists know that people’s attitudes define whether they have a successful, bright, happy future. Most people can agree that this is the case, but people must ask themselves why and what really makes up a person’s attitude. In past years, attitude was recognized as one of the most important psychological experiences of human beings. Over time, the significance of attitudes has increased specifically in understanding how people come to be who they are. This paper will discuss the structure of attitudes through the ABC Model which explains three different components (affect, behavior and cognition) and how these components play a role in people’s lives.

An attitude is "a relatively enduring organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavioral tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols" (Hogg, & Vaughan 2005.)

We define an attitude as a summary evaluation of an object of thought. An attitude object is anything a person holds in mind, be it concrete (e.g. pizza) or abstract (e.g. freedom of speech), be it things, persons, groups or abstract ideas. Attitudes can encompass affective, behavioural and cognitive responses, as summarized in the Tripartide model of attitudes (Allport, 1935) An environmentalist might strongly believe that air pollution destroys the ozone layer, which increases the risk of cancer(cognitive); it might get angry or sad about the extinction of endangered species (affective) and it might use public transportation rather than a car and participate in recycling (behavioural). Because it is difficult to separate the different classes of response from each other and because it is not a necessity for all classes to be represented, we adopted a one-dimensional definition of attitude as a summary evaluation

Attitudes refer to one’s evaluations of the social world: others, objects and ideas. These overall evaluations can be positive, negative, or neutral, vary in their extremity and be based on a variety of information (Tesser and Martin, 1996; Petty, Wheeler, and Tormala, 2003 ). A popular conceptualization of the attitude construct, the tripartite theory, holds that there are three primary types of information in which attitudes can be based (Breckler, 1984; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960; Zanna & Rempel, 1988) : cognitions or beliefs, affect or feelings and actions or behaviour. As defined by Richard Perloff, persuasion is the process which moulds and shapes attitudes. It is through persuasion that changes in attitudes can occur. The two methods

BEHAVIORAL COMPONENT OF ATTITUDE: It means an intention to behave in a certain way towards someone or something.

Attitude is defined as the evaluation of ideas, events, people, or objects. It is influenced by behavioral beliefs about the consequences of preforming an action and outcome evaluation of the consequence of the action (i.e. how much one value’s the result of the action in question) (Connor, 1988, p. 1431).

According to Chochinov (2007), Attitude is ones perceptions, which is vital in first impressions in terms of a non-biased or non-prejudiced approach towards any kind of patient. One’s attitude is based on assumptions due to one’s environment and therefore conscious physiological consideration is