Attitude (Encyclopaedia Brittanica)

Attitude, in social psychology, a predisposition to classify objects and events and to react to them with some degree of evaluative consistency. While attitudes logically are hypothetical constructs (i.e., they are inferred but not objectively observable), they are manifested in conscious experience, verbal reports, gross behaviour, and physiological symptoms. The concept of attitude arises from attempts to account for observed regularities in the behaviour of individual persons. One tends to group others around him into common classes; he may assign people of a given skin colour to a single class and behave similarly toward all of them. In such case he is said to hold an attitude specific to that ethnic or racial group. He may lump together the rich or the pious or the lame and so is assumed to bear a particular attitude toward each group. Individuals also classify such objects as paintings or such events as battles and therefore may be considered to have distinctive attitudes toward nonobjective art or toward war. The quality of one's attitudes is judged from the observable, evaluative responses he tends to make. He might react to everyone of the same ethnic background with expressions of dislike, with derogatory comments about their honesty or intelligence, or he may advocate repressive, exclusionary public policies against them. On the evidence of such negative responses he is said to have an unfavourable attitude toward that ethnic group. Someone who uniformly praises nonobjective paintings, who frequently attends museums that exhibit them, and who hangs their reproductions on his walls is judged to hold a favourable attitude toward nonobjective art. Attitudes held by others are not directly observable; they must be inferred from behaviour. While one might consult his inner experiences as evidence of his own attitudes, only his public behaviour can receive objective study. Thus, investigators heavily depend on behavioral indexes of attitudese.g. on what people say, on how they respond to questionnaires, or on such physiological signs as changes in heart rate. Some authorities see the critical distinction between attitudes and a number of other terms to reside in their relative inclusiveness. Attitudes can be arranged in a hierarchy based on their degree of specificity or exclusiveness. "Values" are said to represent very broad tendencies of this type, "interests" being slightly less inclusive, and "sentiments" narrower still; "attitudes" are viewed as still more narrow predispositions, with "beliefs" and "opinions" being progressively the most specific members of this hierarchy. According to this terminology the difference is one of degree rather than of kind.

Other investigators consider one's attitude toward any class to be the intensity with which he expects that group to serve his own values. For example, he may be asked to rate the extent to which he prizes given values (such as health, safety, independence, justice). Then he estimates the degree to which that class (say, politicians) tends to facilitate or impede each value. The sum of the products of these two ratings provides a measure of the individual's attitude toward the group. Thus, if he highly prizes justice, and judges that politicians severely interfere with it, his attitude toward that class is taken to be negative. Attitudes sometimes are regarded as underlying predispositions, and opinions as their overt manifestations. A rarer distinction equates attitudes with unconscious and irrational tendencies, and opinions with conscious and rational activities. Others refer to attitudes as meaningful and central and to opinions as more peripheral and inconsequential. A still more popular distinction refers attitudes to matters of taste (e.g., liking a certain country or type of music) and opinions to questions of fact (e.g., whether Zeus exists). Some apply the term "knowledge" to what are held to be certainties and "attitudes" to what is uncertain, even using them to mean "true11 and "false" beliefs, respectively. Another suggestion is that attitudes refer to beliefs that impel action and that knowledge is more intellectual and passive. There are many confusing alternative conventions for distinguishing attitudes from such related concepts as values, opinions, and knowledge. This tends to generate unnecessary dispute and mere proliferation of language. Generally accepted terminology is lacking and investigators often accept or discard distinctions as they judge them to be useful.