What is Attitude?
In psychology, an attitude refers to a set of emotions, beliefs, and behaviours toward a particular
object, person, thing, or event. Attitudes are often the result of experience or upbringing, and they
can have a powerful influence over behaviour. While attitudes are enduring, they can also change.
Psychologists define attitudes as a learned tendency to evaluate things in a certain way. This can
include evaluations of people, issues, objects, or events. Such evaluations are often positive or
negative, but they can also be uncertain at times. Attitude is the manner, disposition, feeling, and
position about a person or thing, tendency, or orientation, especially in mind. According to Gordon
Allport, “An attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience,
exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations
with which it is related.” Thurstone said, “An attitude denotes the total of man’s inclinations and
feelings, prejudice or bias, preconceived notions, ideas, fears, threats, and other any specific topic.”
Anastasi defined attitude as “A tendency to react favourably or unfavourably towards a designated
class of stimuli, such as a national or racial group, a custom or an institution.”
For example, you might have mixed feelings about a particular person or issue. Researchers also
suggest that there are several different components that make up attitudes.1 The components of
attitudes are sometimes referred to as CAB or the ABC's of attitude.
Components of Attitude:
Cognitive Component: Your thoughts and beliefs about the subject. The cognitive
component of attitudes refers to the beliefs, thoughts, and attributes that we would
associate with an object. It is the opinion or belief segment of an attitude. It refers to that
part of attitude which is related in general knowledge of a person. Typically, these come to
light in generalities or stereotypes, such as “all babies are cute”, “smoking is harmful to
health” etc.
Affective Component: How the object, person, issue, or event makes you feel. Affective
component is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude. It is related to the statement
which affects another person. It deals with feelings or emotions that are brought to the
surface about something, such as fear or hate. Using the above example, someone might
have the attitude that they love all babies because they are cute or that they hate smoking
because it is harmful to health.
Behavioural Component: How attitude influences your behaviour. Behaviour component of
an attitude consists of a person’s tendencies to behave in a particular way toward an
object. It refers to that part of attitude which reflects the intention of a person in the short-
run or long run. Using the above example, the behavioural attitude maybe, “I cannot wait to
kiss the baby”, or “we better keep those smokers out of the library”, etc.
Attitudes can also be explicit and implicit. Explicit attitudes are those that we are consciously aware
of and that clearly influence our behaviours and beliefs. Implicit attitudes are unconscious but still
have an effect on our beliefs and behaviours. Attitude is composed of three components, which
include a cognitive component, effective or emotional component, and a behavioural component.
Basically, the cognitive component is based on the information or knowledge, whereas the affective
component is based on the feelings. The behavioural component reflects how attitude affects the
