Question

1. Discuss attitudes and their formation giving real life examples.

Answer 1

In very simple words we can define attitudes as a way through which an individual thinks or it is a type of feeling which can be seen in the behaviour of the individual. Attitudes can be defined as a set of beliefs , feelings or emotions towards a particular object, person or scenario. There are four types of attitudes

• Positive
• Negative
• Neutral
• Sikken

Now coming to the components of attitude .There are three components associated with attitudes .They are

• Affective component - It is an emotional component which is associated with the emotional reaction towards an object or situation. We can take the example of a person who is afraid of spiders. Thinking about spiders makes him or her feel anxious and nervous . In this case spider is a attitude object .
• Behavioral component - This component is associated with how an individual reacts or behaves when he or she is exposed to an attitude object . So the person who is afraid of spiders screams when exposed to them .This is the behaviour component .
• Cognitive Component- It is the information we have about the object , our thoughts and beliefs about the object .In our case the object is spider . These are formed through our acquired knowledge and information .In our case the person thinks spiders are in some way poisonous and harmful to him or her .  

Formation of attitudes

Attitudes are formed when we are exposed to a situation or to a stimuli .It is a process and not a random judgement or opinion .In the end an evaluation is done by us . We can take real life examples . Suppose John visits a supermarket store for the first time .In the beginning he does not have any kind of opinion a, attitude or belief towards the store .During his visit he was treated very politely by the staff and customers service was very good .He develops a positive opinion or we can say an attitude towards the supermarket store .So next time he visits the store with a positive attitude .Similarity if john is treated badly and unresponsive customer staff then he develops a negative attitude and avoids visiting the store next time . Sometimes attitudes are formed because of our ego defence mechanism in which we try to save ourselves .