Attitude is your evaluation of a person, concept, or object, usually in positive or negative terms. You form attitudes about many things, from supermarket products to global populations and political issues. Each attitude is often described as having three parts:

• An affective component: your emotional response
• A behavioral component: how the attitude influences your actions
• A cognitive component: your knowledge or beliefs

The link between attitudes and behavior

Processes by which behavior influences attitudes

1. Foot-in-the-door phenomenon: This involves first getting someone to agree to a small favor or minor purchase, and then following up with a request for a larger favor or bigger purchase. After people commit to a smaller action, they’re more likely to stay consistent and comply with a bigger request.
2. Role-playing effects: These occur when individuals follow a social script and behave according to an assigned role (e.g., participants acting as guards or prisoners). Over time, they may internalize the role and begin to show behaviors that fit it.
3. Justification of effort: This occurs when individuals shift their attitudes to match the effort they’ve already invested in a situation or decision.
4. Public declarations: This involves openly stating a belief or position. Doing so can increase the chance of internalizing that viewpoint because of social pressures and the desire to appear consistent.

Persuasion

• Persuasion changes an attitude through communication. Many outside sources try to persuade us every day:
  • Source features: The credibility and attractiveness of the speaker.
  • Message features: Subtlety, sidedness (number of perspectives), timing, and message order.
  • Audience features: Attention level, intelligence, self-esteem, and age.

Cognitive dissonance theory

• Cognitive dissonance is the tension that comes from holding inconsistent attitudes, actions, or beliefs. This discomfort motivates people to reduce the inconsistency - for example, by changing an attitude, justifying an action, or finding a compromise. For instance, learning troubling facts about industrial farming may conflict with a love for beef, leading someone to reduce or change their beef consumption.

Processes by which attitudes influence behavior

• One model, the theory of planned behavior, suggests that people’s behavioral beliefs shape their attitudes toward a specific action, which then guides their intentions and later behavior. For example, believing it’s wrong to keep a phone on in a movie theater can strongly predict that you’ll silence or shut off your phone in that setting.

Factors that influence motivation within attitude contexts

• Instinct: Biological, unlearned patterns of behavior that can shape how we respond or adapt.
• Arousal: The idea that performance is best at an optimal arousal level (e.g., the Yerkes-Dodson law).
• Drives (Negative-feedback systems): Homeostatic mechanisms that trigger behaviors to restore balance.
• Needs: Hierarchies or priorities that can redirect or modify our attitudes and the behaviors that follow from them.