Chapter 5 Attitudes

a. A relatively endruing organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols. 

b. A general feeling or evaluation - positive or negative - about some person, object or issue. 

An attitude consist of affect towards or evaluation of the object. 

An attitude consists of a mental readyness to act. It also guides evaluative (judgemental) responses. 

An attitude consists of cognitive, affective and behavioural components. This threefold division has an ancient heritage, stressing thought, feeling and action as basic to human experience. 

Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relation among these attributes. 

Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members. 

A group of attitude theories stressing that people try to maintain internal consistency, order and agreement among their various cognitions. 

The knowledge, beliefs, thoughts and ideas that people have about themselves and their environment. May also refer to mental processes through which knowledge is acquired, including perception, memory and thinking. 

According to Heider, people prefer attitudes that are consistent with each other over those that are inconsistent. A person (P) tries to maintain consistency in attitudes to, and relationships with, other people (O) and elements of the environment (X). 

Attitude theory highlighting an evaluative component. Knowledge of an object is represented in memory along with a summary of how to appraise it. 

The evaluation of information; in relation to attitudes, the means by which people acquire knowledge and form and change attitudes. 

The idea that a person's attitude can be estimated by averaging across the positive and negative ratings of the object. 

Approach to the study of impression formation that focuses on how people combine attributes that valence into an overall positive or negative impression. 

Statistical procedure that combines data from different studies to measure the overall reliability and strength of specific effects. 

Term for a general behavioural index based on an average or combination of several specific behaviours. 

Fishbein and Ajzen's theory of the relationship between attitudes and behaviour. A specific attitude that has normative support predicts an intention to act, which then predicts actual behaviour. 

Modification by Ajzen of the theory of reasoned action. It suggests that predicting a behaviour form an attitude measure is improved if people believe they have control over that behaviour. 

Adopting a healthy behaviour recquires cognitive balancing between the perceived threat of illness and one's capacity to cope with the health regimen. 

Expectation that we have about our capacity to succeed in particular tasks. 

According to Fazio, attitudes that have a strong evaluative link to situational cues are more likely to come automatically to mind from memory. 

A variable that qualifies an otherwise simple hypothesis with a view to improving its predictive power (eg. A causes B, but only when C is present).

The process of forming our attitudes, mainly from our own experiences, the influences of others and our emotional reactions. 

Repeated exposure to an object results in greater attraction to that object. 

A stimulus that will become more liked or less liked when it is consistently paired with stimuli that are either positive or negative. 

A liked or disliked person may affect not only the evaluation of a second person directly associated but also others merely associated with the second person. 

Tendency for a person to reproduce actions, attitudes and emotional repsonses exhibited by a real-life or symbolic model. Also called observational learning. 

Bem's idea that we gain knowledge of ourselves only by making self-attributions; for example, we infer our own attitudes from our own behaviour. 

A higher-order concept thought to provide a structure for organising attitudes. 

A systematically interrelated set of beliefs whose primary function is explanation. It circumscribes thinking, making it difficult for the holder to escape from its mould. 

The notion that the most fundamental human motivation is to reduce the terror of the inevitability of death. Self-esteem may be centrally implicated in effective terror management. 

Collectively elaborated explanations of unfamiliar and complex phenomena that transform them into a familiar and simple form.