Attitude Structure
The classic, tripartite view offered by William J. McGuire is that an attitude contains cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Empirical research, however, fails to support clear distinctions between thoughts, emotions, and behavioral intentions associated with a particular attitude. A criticism of the tripartite view of attitudes is that it requires cognitive, affective, and behavioral associations of an attitude to be consistent, but this may be implausible. Thus some views of attitude structure see the cognitive and behavioral components as derivative of affect or affect and behavior as derivative of underlying beliefs.
Despite debate about the particular structure of attitudes, there is considerable evidence that attitudes reflect more than evaluations of a particular object that vary from positive to negative. Attitudes also have other characteristics, such as importance, certainty, or accessibility (measures of attitude strength) and associated knowledge.
There is also considerable interest in inter-attitudinal structure, which connects different attitudes to one another and to more underlying psychological structures, such as values or ideology.
Read more about this topic: Attitude (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the words attitude and/or structure:
“The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it’s an example of freedom from religion.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“... the structure of our public morality crashed to earth. Above its grave a tombstone read, “Be tolerant—even of evil.” Logically the next step would be to say to our commonwealth’s criminals, “I disagree that it’s all right to rob and murder, but naturally I respect your opinion.” Tolerance is only complacence when it makes no distinction between right and wrong.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 2, ch. 2 (1962)