THE CONCEPT OF ATTITUDE

“She’s got an attitude problem,” someone says, telegraphing familiarity with the term attitude. But being familiar with a term does not mean one can necessarily articulate a clear, comprehensive definition. This is a task that we look to scholars to perform, and social scientists have offered a litany of definitions of attitude, dating back to the 19th century. Darwin regarded attitude as a motor concept (a scowling face signifies a “hostile attitude”; see Petty, Ostrom, & Brock, 1981). Freud, by contrast, “endowed [attitudes] with vitality, identifying them with longing, hatred and love, with passion and prejudice” (Allport, 1935, p. 801). Early-20th-century sociologists Thomas and Znaniecki placed attitude in a social context, defining it as an individual’s state of mind regarding a value (Allport, 1935).

Their view resonated with a growing belief that the social environment influenced individuals, but then-contemporary terms like custom and social force were too vague and impersonal to capture the complex dynamics by which this occurred. Attitude, which referred to a force or quality of mind, seemed much more appropriate. By the 1930s, as researchers began to study the development of racial stereotypes, Gordon Allport (1935) declared that attitude was the most indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology.

Over the past century, attitude research has flourished. Social scientists have conducted surveys of people’s attitudes, examining political, religious, and sex-role attitudes, to name but a few. They have explored the structure and functions of attitudes and documented relationships between attitudes and behavior. “A recent search for the term attitude in the American Psychological Association’s comprehensive index to psychological and related literature (PsycINFO) yielded 180,910 references,” Dolores Albarracín and her colleagues declared with perhaps a little bit of pride (Albarracín, Johnson, & Zanna, 2005, p. vii).

Attitude is a psychological construct. It is a mental and emotional entity that inheres in, or characterizes, the person. It has also been called a “hypothetical construct,” a concept that cannot be observed directly but can only be inferred from people’s actions. An exemplar of this approach is the University of Michigan psychology professor who ran through the halls of his department shouting (in jest), “I found it. I found it. I found the attitude.” His comment illustrates that attitudes are different from the raw materials that other scientific disciplines examine—materials that can be touched or clearly seen, such as a rock, plant cell, or an organ in the human body.

Although in some sense we do infer a person’s attitude from what he or she says or does, it would be a mistake to assume that for this reason attitudes are not real or are “mere mental constructs.” This is a fallacy of behaviorism, the scientific theory that argues that all human activity can be reduced to behavioral units. Contemporary scholars reject this notion. They note that people have thoughts, cognitive structures, and a variety of emotions, all of which lose their essential qualities when viewed exclusively as behaviors. Moreover, they argue that an entity that is mental or emotional is no less real than a physical behavior. As Allport noted perceptively:

Attitudes are never directly observed, but, unless they are admitted, through infer - ence, as real and substantial ingredients in human nature, it becomes impossible to account satisfactorily either for the consistency of any individual’s behavior, or for the stability of any society.

(1935, p. 839) Over the past century, numerous definitions of attitude have been proposed. The following views of attitude are representative of the population of definitions. According to scholars, an attitude is:

■ an association between a given object and a given evaluation (Fazio, 1989, p. 155); ■ a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with

■ a learned predisposition to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to a given object (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, p. 6); or

■ a more or less permanently enduring state of readiness of mental organization which predisposes an individual to react in a characteristic way to any object or situation with which it is related (Cantril, quoted in Allport, 1935, p. 804).

Notice that these definitions emphasize different aspects of the attitude concept. Fazio focuses simply on the mental association of an object and a feeling. Eagly and Chaiken stress that attitudes involve a person’s evaluation of an issue. Fishbein and Ajzen, as well as Cantril, take a behavioral view, suggesting that attitudes predispose people to behave in a particular way. Which is right, you ask? Which definition is the correct one? There are no objective answers to these questions. As was the case with the definition of persuasion, scholars differ in how they view a particular phenomenon. You cannot say that one definition is more correct than another because defining terms is a logical, not empirical, exercise. If you find the lack of certainty frustrating, you’re not alone. But take heart! Science has to start somewhere. Someone has to come up with a workable definition of a term before the empirical explorations can begin. Science requires a leap of faith. Yet this does not mean that one must settle with definitions that are inadequate or incomplete. Definitions are evaluated on the basis of their clarity, cogency, and comprehensiveness. The above definitions of attitude are erudite and perceptive. So which definition is correct? All are, in varying degrees. In this, a text - book that offers multiple approaches, I offer an integrative approach that combines these definitions and emphasizes commonalities.

Attitude is defined as: a learned, global evaluation of an object (person, place, or issue) that influences thought and action. Psychologically, an attitude is not a behavior, though it may consist of acquired patterns of reacting to social stimuli. It is not pure affect, though it is most assuredly emotional. It is a predisposition, a tendency, a state of readi- ness that guides and steers behavior in certain predictable, though not always rational, ways. The next section reviews the different components of the definition of attitude.