Making Evaluations About the World - Essay Example

Attitudes: Making Evaluations about the World Introduction Attitudes get defined as the evaluations that people create about objects, events, ideas and people. They can either be negative or positive. Attitudes can be placed into two groups; implicit and explicit attitudes.  Explicit attitudes deal with belief consciousness that guides behavior and people’s decisions. On the other hand, attitudes that are implicit deal with belief unconsciousness that influences behavior and decisions of an individual. Attitudes include three components: emotional, behavioral and cognitive components. Besides attitude components, there are also attitude dimensions that include; accessibility, strength, and ambivalence. They can also become regarded as enduring structures of beliefs that can only be examined in three levels. The cognitive level which deals with how people reason and think through an attitude, the emotional level which is how people feel in regard to an attitude and the behavioral level which involves how people feel in regard to an attitude (Crano and Prislin 2). The world can become an extremely complicated place to live. In order to live in the world successfully, human beings should develop ways to simplify life. There are several ways through which simplification can be achieved by the use of abilities. An ability that is extremely crucial is that of forming preferences. People have the ability to decide whether something is defective or substantial and in return, they use their mechanism to store them. As a result, the preference that gets developed from the recent experience can be applied to guide the behavior of a person instead of moving to the next situation empty headed. A remarkably efficient system could accomplish these things automatically without any deliberate effort or conscious thought. Hence, it serves as an intuitive and quick responding guide (Crano and Prislin 5). Deliberate conscious thinking gets reserved for situations where there are no available and automatic preferences. If the previous experience is not applicable, there will be an override of conscious deliberation as well as regulation or adjustment of the expression of generated automatic preferences. For human beings and other organisms, the automated system that gets used to evaluate the world developed a long time ago over the path of evolutionary history. Such operations of mental comprehension, involve tools for analyzing the situation and relevant concepts evaluation, sometimes without thought (Crano and Prislin 15). When a person has both explicit and implicit attitude, they end up creating a conflict of possibility. Therefore, a variety of circumstances may lead to the differing of these evaluations. For instance, individuals who prize the goodness of being an egalitarian might hold equally positive feeling of explicit attitude towards people of all ethnicities. On the other hand, such a person possesses implicit attitudes. These attitudes can be obtained from the experience of a given culture (Crano and Prislin 23). An individual can possess an exceptionally strong attitude towards the world. Strong attitudes are those that a person holds firmly and have high influence on his or her behavior. Important attitudes that a person has towards the world tend to be remarkably strong. Attitudes that create a lot of interest become exceedingly strong among human beings. People will always tend to posses stronger attitudes about world events, ideas, and things that they have considerable knowledge or information (Crano and Prislin 43). On the other hand, the accessibility of an attitude towards the world depends on how easy it can come to the mind of a person. When attitudes towards the world become stronger they tend to get easily accessible. Consequently, the ambivalence of an attitude towards the world relies on the ratio of negative evaluation and positive evaluation that can make up that attitude. The ambivalence of that attitude increases as the negative and positive evaluations become equal. The attitudes of a person towards the world can either be true or real. Whether true or real, it provides crucial information about an individual. They can also guide the behavior of an individual (Crano and Prislin 57). Even though, behavior cannot get used to reflect the attitudes of a person towards the world, attitudes determine his or her behavior to some extent. When there are few influences from outside, behavior becomes guided by attitudes. On the other hand, the behavior pattern of an individual on social roles can be considered appropriate dependent on the context. For example, men and women behave differently in society (Crano and Prislin32). The change of a person’s attitude towards the world gets accounted for by three theories. These theories show how attitudes of a person towards the world can become formed and then changed by the use of the principles of learning. These principles include observational learning, operational conditioning and classical conditioning. In classical conditioning, emotional components are affected. For instance, an advert on a billboard about a certain product or idea can elicit an emotional response that is extraordinarily pleasant. As a result, it causes people to form attitudes that are positive towards that product or idea. In operational conditioning, when a person gets a response that is positive from other people while expressing an attitude, it can become reinforced and tends to grow stronger. Alternatively, if there is a negative response, the attitude will not become reinforced, and it will tend to grow weaker. An individual can also form an attitude by learning through observation. When a person sees other people display a certain attitude and reinforce it through expression, it creates an encouragement to adopt such attitudes (Crano and Prislin 75). The theory of dissonance proposes that an individual can change his or her attitude when they happen to posses some attitudes that seem inconsistent with each other. Usually, people experience a dissonance that is cognitive when they have cognitions that create a conflict with others. As a result, they create a state of tension that is terribly unpleasant. Therefore, people change their own attitudes to decrease the tension (Crano and Prislin 77). The likelihood elaboration models show that the change of attitude can be more permanent if the elaboration and thought persuasive information can be used. If an individual provides thorough thought persuasive information to form the change of attitude, he or she is likely to succeed than when he or she gives shallow or neutral persuasive message (Crano and Prislin 78). Conclusion Multiple factors significantly influence the attitudes of a person towards the world. The main influences are social desirability and elaboration. Social desirability is the need to express ideas that are unpopular. Elaboration refers to the amount of time or practice thinking. Some attitudes can show stability with time as well as flexibility based on expression on social immediate circumstances. Much of a person’s mental work takes place outside conscious control and conscious awareness without intention and without the requirement of self reflection. Some attitudes facilitate rapid, heuristic assessment of social context. Therefore, getting evidence of a person’s attitudes towards the world can be a surprise because they cannot fit with the manner in which individuals view themselves. As a result, such an occurrence challenges and provokes individuals to think about the manner in which they may understand their attitudes and align them as well as their intentions and goals. Works Cited William D. Crano, Radmila Prislin. Attitudes And Attitude Change. Kentucky: Psychology Press, 2008. Print Read More