What Extent May Attitudes Predict Behavior?

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.

It has been thoroughly thought over what current topic or issue that people experience in most environments today, at both a micro and macro level that would be able to be examined and have come to the decision of looking at the most widely discussed subject, prejudice. All people are affected by prejudice in one way or another and it can impact on people's lives depending on what form it has taken. Also to be able to acknowledge that all people can be prejudices and see this is the first step to overcoming it.. The question that has been decided upon is that of “What types of prejudice do we see commonly today and how do they affect an individual at a micro and macro level?”

Cultural influence affects not only the formation of a stereotype, but also its acceptance. According to the tripartite model of attitudes, a stereotype is the cognitive component of prejudiced attitudes. Many contemporary theorists suggest prejudice is an inevitable consequence of the stereotyping process (Devine, 1989). This makes learning attitudes and stereotypes of social groups inevitable. There is strong evidence that stereotypes are established in children’s memories before they have the ability to use cognitive processing to accept or reject the stereotypes. In this developmental process, the stereotype is easier to access for the child than personal beliefs; therefore, the culture an individual lives in makes it impossible not to apply stereotypes in daily life (Devine, 1989).

The definition of prejudice may vary among the different psychologist but most will agree that prejudice has something to do with prejudgment, typically negative, about a group. (Fiskie, 1998; Jones, 1997; Nelson, 2002 ). According to Plous (2003), Prejudice is not exactly considered an opinion, but an attitude which includes feeling such as hating the group, rather than believing they’re bad. Within psychology, we can link prejudice with discrimination and stereotyping (Plous, 2003). Although each may go together, they can be done separately. Prejudice and discrimination are most likely absent in a positive stereo type (Plous, 2013). For example describing an ethnic group as “family oriented”. Stereo typing does little to no harm without discrimination or prejudice. A generalized form of prejudice may lack discrimination and stereo types, such as being against foreigners.

Regarding the film Zootopia, there are several social psychological concepts that were explained in the events. Throughout the film, subtle but offensive comments and actions are unintentionally and unconsciously directed toward the non-dominant group (predators) and the protagonist of the film, Judy Hopps, encounters those macroaggressions throughout the story. As the film progressed, the police force became increasingly fearful and pejorative of the predator group in the city, which drew similarities to the attitudes exhibited by law enforcement officers in American society. Attitudes provide an association between a concept and an evaluation, whether it is favorable or unfavorable, desirable or undesirable, positive or negative. In addition, attitudes can be classified as automatic or deliberate. In comparison to the reflective responses (also called explicit attitudes) that individuals exhibit, the (automatic) implicit attitudes are relatively inaccessible to control and conscious awareness.

The first experiment conducted by Devine and colleagues conducted a well thought out experiment in terms of their technique. In all three studies the authors’ randomly assigned the participants to the experiments increasing the ability to generalize this sample to a larger population. In addition, the participants were asked to freely respond to the question, providing a more accurate knowledge of stereotypes because no cues were provided to influence the subjects’ knowledge. The anonymity of the participants also allows subjects to freely provide information without being judged resulting in an easier access to their private thoughts. Alternatively, in all three studies the authors recruited a number of white participants. This may produce bias in their results as stereotypes and prejudice towards blacks have historical roots in their culture. In the first study, the list of traits do not completely capture

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Do attitudes predict behaviour? It is not easy to find the correct answer to this question. The relationship between attitudes and behaviour is one of the most controversial topics in social psychology. This essay explores whether attitudes can predict behaviours using two of theories of behaviour change: Cognitive Dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) and Self-Perception Theory (Bem, 1965, 1967).

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.

The psychological concepts involved in this contemporary issue are implicit attitudes, obedience to authority, and dissonance reduction. Implicit attitudes are attitudes that are involuntary, unconscious, uncontrollable, and typically unknown to us. They differ from their counterpart explicit attitudes which are ones we

[11]. In general it can be said that positive attitudes can lead to educational, social, medical and occupational inclusion. On the other hand negative attitudes can lead to rejection, segregation, degradation, inequality, inequity, exclusion, discrimination and stigmatization. Negative attitudes are often based on beliefs, lack of knowledge and the misconception of the cause of

Attitudes are defined as “Relatively stable feelings or beliefs that are directed towards specific persons, groups, ideas, jobs or other objects” (P.358). Due to the Hawthorne effect, studies suggested that attitudes, moral and production were closely linked in a positive relationship. We could only imagine that organizations were fast to hear about this and implement actions to improve the overall moral. However, this was not easy for them since they had to study worker’s behaviors in order to know what would be satisfying and what would not be. In addition, they had to figure out how to measure satisfaction. According to Landy, new variables to work