Attitude Developement

Attitude Development

Jarrod Nunes

Instructors ' Name

An attitude can be viewed as a fundamental entity containing elements of all three learning domains : cognitive , psychomotor , and affective (Palmer Birch , 2004 . Some attitudes appear to be acquired in early childhood and remain fairly stable thereafter others are not acquired until considerably later in adolescence and are readily subject to modification . A general sequence in the learning of attitudes involves being aware of and receiving stimuli , responding to stimuli from mere acquiescence through obtaining satisfaction in the response , forming values from first acceptance

through commitment , conceptualization of values , and finally characterization in a philosophy of life (Goodwin Klausmeier , 1996 . Very broadly , attitudes are adjustments , ways in which a person has learned to cope with his world by forming relatively stable orientations toward common objects of his experience

There are three basic determinants of attitudes , each of which constitutes a basic function of attitudes for human adjustment Attitudes are determined by (1 ) the external world of physical reality that we come to know through our senses (2 ) the social world of other people that we know through contact and communication with them , and (3 the world of our own inner personality that manifests itself through our thought and action . The functions attitudes fulfill are thus respectively (1 ) to aid in our adjustment to reality by giving us a useful way of organizing the information from our senses (2 ) to aid in our adjustment to other people through attitudes that facilitate communication and agreement , and (3 ) to express and achieve our inner personality needs in developing orientations toward things around us And attitudes typically function in all these ways at one and the same time (Palmer Birch , 2004

Sometimes one or another of these three determinants may appear to be the primary base for an attitude--information , social conformity , or psychic needs--but nearly always all of these are involved to some degree . For attitudes are ways by which we mediate between the information our senses bring us and the needs we have within , between the needs we have within and the social pressures without , between the pressures of social conformity and the demands of objective reality Through our attitudes these forces may cushion each other 's impact yielding an emergent unity in behavior that would not be present without such mediation

Once the one recognizes upon what attitudes are based , he /she can see more clearly what is involved in attitude development . If we want to change someone 's attitude , it is first important to make a judgment of roughly to what extent it is based on information about objective reality , to what extent it is rooted in social conformity , and to what extent it is the expression of deep-seated personality needs

To the extent to which an attitude is based upon a person 's knowledge about reality , to that extent it may be developed through new information . In for attitude to develop through new information two basic processes are necessary . The information must be...