attitude

Examples of attitude in the following topics:

• Defining Attitude

  • When defining attitude, it is helpful to bear two useful conflicts in mind.
  • People with a positive attitude can lift the spirits of their co-workers, while a person with a negative attitude can lower their spirits.
  • Is it a manager's responsibility to help change the person's attitude?
  • At times, attitudes are beyond the reach of the business to improve.
  • A person's attitude can be influenced by his or her environment, just as a person's attitude affects his or her environment.

• Definition of Terms

  • Affective learning outcomes involve attitudes, motivation, and values.
  • Attitudes.
  • Attitude Change.
  • Attitude change is any alteration in the direction, degree, or intensity of an attitude.
  • Moreover, attitudes about one object may be connected to attitudes about another object, and change in one attitude may lead to change in others (Zimbardo & Leippe, 1991).

• How Attitude Influences Behavior

  • Attitudes can positively or negatively affect a person's behavior.
  • Attitude and behavior interact differently based upon the attitude in question.
  • Understanding different types of attitudes and their likely implications is useful in predicting how individuals' attitudes may govern their behavior.
  • Daniel Katz uses four attitude classifications:
  • Ego-defensive: People have a tendency to use attitudes to protect their ego, resulting in a common negative attitude.

• Attitudes

  • Attitude is our evaluation of a person, an idea, or an object.
  • For example, you may hold a positive attitude toward recycling.
  • It is well accepted that attitudes can affect behaviors, and behaviors can affect attitudes, depending on the situation.
  • Explicit attitudes are deliberately formed attitudes that an individual is aware of having, and they can be measured by self-report and questionnaires.
  • The formation of many attitudes is believed to happen due to conditioning or social learning, and attitudes in general are expected to change with experience.

• Attitude

  • Attitude is one of Carl Jung's 57 definitions in Chapter XI of Psychological Types.
  • Attitudes can be difficult to measure because attitudes are a hypothetical construct that cannot be observed directly.
  • Attitudes can be changed through persuasion in response to communication.
  • Sometimes presenting both sides of a story is useful to help change attitudes.
  • Carl Jung developed a definition of attitude as it relates to the field of Psychology.

• Conclusion

  • Although much research is still needed, it is clear that there are effective instructional strategies to promote attitude formation and change.
  • Effective attitude instruction presents a persuasive message containing new information which relates to something the learner already knows.
  • It involves the learner emotionally, for example, by presenting a credible role model demonstrating a behavior that is consistent with the desired attitude and that is positively reinforced.
  • Finally, it provides learners with an opportunity to express or act out the target attitude, and responds to that expression with positive reinforcement.
  • Any instruction that includes these qualities is likely to result in the desired attitude formation or change.

• Theories of Attitude Formation and Change

  • Learning theories of attitude change, no longer as popular as they once were, focus on reinforced behavior as the primary factor responsible for attitude development.
  • Early research on attitude change drew on Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, which posits that, when a person is persuaded to act in a way that is not congruent with a pre-existing attitude, he or she may change the attitude to reduce dissonance (Smith & Ragan, 1999).
  • Social judgment theories emphasize the role of prior attitudes in shaping attitude formation and change.
  • As with dissonance theory, social judgment theory presents attitude change as a response to the receipt of a message that is not entirely congruent with the currently held attitude.
  • Overview of the theories of attitude formation and change

• Introduction

  • Even when they are not explicitly stated, attitude objectives are pervasive in school work (Smith & Ragan, 1999).
  • Although they may not always be aware of it, most teachers are involved in some form of attitude teaching.
  • In some cases, attitude learning is the main objective of instruction.
  • Anti-drug campaigns and corporate diversity training are examples of this type of attitude-focused instruction.
  • Whether attitude learning is one component, or the central focus, of instruction, specific instructional strategies may be employed to bring it about.

• Research on Attitudes and Attitude Change

  • Simonson and Maushak (2001) have found that there is a dearth of good instructional technology research on attitudes:
  • It is obvious that attitude study is not an area of interest or importance in mainstream instructional technology research.
  • Moreover, there are several flaws common to many of the attitude studies that have been undertaken.
  • These include poor definition of the construct (attitude) in question, poor measurement practices, including the failure to document development of the measurement instrument, and tacking on an attitude variable after data collection has occurred rather than considering attitudes at the onset of the research (Simonson & Maushak, 2001).
  • Most of the existing measurement instruments for assessing attitudes and attitude change employ quantitative survey scales with the assumption that different respondents will interpret items in a similar manner (Zimbardo & Leippe, 1991).

• Instructional Design for Attitude Change

  • The importance of this cognitive engagement for attitude change should not be underestimated.
  • A meta-analysis of attitude change studies relating to bias and prejudice has shown that shorter treatments generally produced more attitude change than did longer ones.
  • Thus, the importance of confirming and strengthening existing positive attitudes should not be overlooked.
  • The more thought-through an attitude is, the more resistant it is to change (Zimbardo & Leippe, 1991).
  • While general attitudes are good predictors of general behaviors, and specific attitudes are good predictors of specific behaviors, the general does not reliably predict the specific, nor the specific the general (Simonson & Maushak, 2000).