Attitude (psychology)

This article is about a psychological term. For other meanings, see attitude

Attitude is a key concept in psychology. Attitudes are positive or negative views of an "attitude object": i.e., a person, behaviour, or event. People can also be "ambivalent" towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative attitude.

Implicit and explicit attitudes

There is also considerable research emerging on "implicit" attitudes, which are attitudes which people are not consciously aware of, but which have real effects as identified through sophisticated experiments using people's response times to stimuli (how quickly they can make judgements about them). Implicit and "explicit" attitudes (i.e. ones people report when they consciously ask themselves how much they like a target objects) both seem to affect people's behaviour, although in different ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases they are. The exact relationship between them is not currently well understood.

Attitude formation

Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience, and there are numerous theories of attitude formation and attitude change, including:

• Dissonance-reductiontheory, associated with Leon Festinger
• Self-perception theory, associated with Daryl Bem
• Meta programs, associated with NLP
• Persuasion
• Elaboration Likelihood Modelassociated with Richard E. Petty
• Social judgment theory
• Balance theory

Attitude in the workplace

When it comes to Human Resource Management and recruiting, in recent years hire for attitudebecame a well known mantra. Several commercial tests such as the LAB Profile, iWAMand PAPI were developed to measure work Attitude and motivation, e.g. for pre-employment testing.

See also

• Allophilia
• Propositional attitude
• Social psychologyde:Einstellung (Psychologie)

pl:Postawa

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude+%28psychology%29 Wikipedia article Attitude (psychology).