ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOUR-
SOME ANALYTICAL CONSIDERATIONS
BY
MARISEN MWALE
Attitudes are evaluative statements either favorable or unfavorable concerning objects, people, or events. According to Fazio and Roskos [1944] attitudes are associations between attitude objects- virtually any aspect of the social world- and evaluations of those objects. Judd et al. (1991) define attitudes as lasting evaluations of various aspects of the social world to the effect of being coded in memory. On the other hand, Fein (1999) considers an attitude as a positive, negative or mixed reaction to a person, object or idea. Attitudes reflect what we feel- for instance when I say ‘I like my job,’ I am expressing my attitude about work. According to Rosenberg and Hovland [1990], attitudes are predispositions to respond to some class of stimuli with certain classes of response.
These classes of response are:
Affective: what a person feels about the attitude object--------how favorably or unfavorably it’s evaluated.
Cognitive: what a person believes the attitude object is like, objectively.
Behavioural: sometimes called the conative; how a person actually responds, or intends to respond, to the attitude object.
An attitude can be thought of as a blend or integration of beliefs and values.
Beliefs represent the knowledge or information we have about the world. These may be inaccurate or incomplete and non-evaluative.
Values refer to an individual’s sense of what is desirable, good, valuable, worthwhile and so on. While most adults will have many thousands of beliefs, they have only hundreds of attitudes and a few dozen values. The belief that ‘discrimination is wrong is a value statement.’ But such an opinion is the cognitive component of an attitude. It sets the stage for the more critical part of an attitude-----its affective component. Affect is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude and is reflected in the statement ‘ I don’t like John because he discriminates against minorities.’
Finally affect can lead to behavioural outcomes. The behavioural component of an attitude refers to an intention to behave in a certain way towards someone or something. Viewing attitudes as made up of three components----cognition, affect and behaviour---is helpful towards understanding their complexity and the potential relationship between attitudes and behaviour.
We need however to bear in mind that the term attitude essentially relates to the affective part of the three components. In contrast to values, attitudes are less stable. In organizations, attitudes are important because they affect job behaviour.
Importance of attitudes
Attitudes are significant for two major reasons:
· Firstly attitudes strongly influence social thought and the conclusions and inferences we reach.
· Secondly attitudes are assumed to influence behavior and if they do they can thus help s to predict behavior.
Attitudes and Consistency
Research has generally concluded that people seek consistency among their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behaviour. This means that individuals seek to reconcile divergent attitudes and align their attitudes and behaviour so that they appear rational and consistent. This can be done by altering either the attitudes or the behaviour, or by developing a rationalization for the discrepancy. Tobacco executives provide an example. One might wonder how these people cope with the ongoing barrage of data linking cigarette smoking and negative health outcomes. They can deny that any clear causation between smoking and cancer, for instance, has been established. They can brainwash themselves by continually articulating the benefits of tobacco.
They can acknowledge the negative consequences of smoking but rationalize that people are going to smoke and that tobacco companies merely promote freedom of choice. They can accept the research evidence and begin actively working to make more healthy cigarettes or at least reduce their availability to more vulnerable groups, such as teenagers. Or they can quit their job because the dissonance is too great. In as far as Tourism is concerned it has been alluded that since Tourism is associated with westernization, it has negative repercussions on culture. Managers in the Tourism industry may try to resolve this inconsistency or dissonance. First they can deny that any clear correlation between Tourism and westernization exists.
Second they can brainwash themselves by continually articulating the benefits of Tourism e.g. being a foreign currency earner. Third they can acknowledge the negative consequences of Tourism but rationalize that people are going to embrace it anyway because that promotes freedom of choice and globalization. Forth they can accept the research evidence and begin actively incorporating aspects of culture into Tourism as happens in Malawi where traditional dances and other cultural entities as souvenirs, curios and such other paraphernalia reflect cultural and traditional values.
Or they can quit their job because the dissonance is too great.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cognitive dissonance denotes an unpleasant state that occurs when we notice that various attitudes we hold or our attitudes and behavior are sometimes inconsistent.
Leon Festinger [1950], proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory sought to explain the linkage between attitudes and behaviour. Dissonance means an inconsistency. Cognitive dissonance refers to any incompatibility that an individual might perceive between two or more of his or her attitudes, or between his or her behaviour and attitudes. Festinger argued that any form of inconsistency is uncomfortable and that individuals will attempt to reduce the dissonance and, hence, the discomfort. Therefore, individuals will seek a stable state in which there is a minimum of dissonance. Festinger proposed that the desire to reduce dissonance would be determined by:
· First, the importance of the elements creating the dissonance.
· Second, the degree of influence the individual believes he or she has over the elements.
· Third, the rewards that may be involved in dissonance.
If the elements creating the dissonance are relatively unimportant, the pressure to correct this imbalance will be low.
How we reduce dissonance
1. Self-justification and trivialization: the dissonance theory assumes that we are motivated to justify our behavior in order to reduce our internal discomfort and to perceive the attitude or behavior alternative left out as relatively unimportant. Research indicates that after making important decisions we usually reduce dissonance by upgrading the chosen alternative and trivializing the alternative forgone.
2. We might change our behavior/attitude so that they are more consistent with each other.
3. We can acquire new information that supports our attitude or behavior.
4. We may be forced to comply by being caught in a situation where we have to do something contrary to our inclinations.
Theoretical implications to organizations
The question is what the organizational implications of the theory are. The theory can help to predict the propensity to engage in attitude and behavioural change. If individuals are required, for example, by the demands of their job to say or do things that contradict their personal attitude, they will tend to modify their attitude in order to make it compatible with the cognition of what they have said or done. Additionally, the greater the dissonance after it has been moderated by importance, choice, and reward factors----the greater the pressure to reduce it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baron, R.A; Byrne, D (2004) Social Psychology. New York: Pearson.
Gollwitzer, P. M; Barth, J.A (1996) The psychology of action: Linking motivation and cognition in behavior. New York: Guilford.
Harmon-Jones, E; Mills, J [Eds.] (1999) Cognitive dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Shavitt, S; Brock, T.C (1994) Persuasion: Psychological insights and perspective. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
No comments:
Post a Comment