Attitude Theories Essay

1174 Words5 Pages
Attitude Theories: Choose two of the theories about how attitudes are formed and in 2 pages compare and contrast the two theories. Outline the components of each theory and discuss how they differ; provide examples of each theory and what you believe to the positive and negative aspects of each. b. Affective - feelings or emotions that something evokes. e.g. fear, sympathy, hate. May dislike welfare recipients. c. Conative, or behavioral - tendency or disposition to act in certain ways toward something. Might want to keep welfare recipients out of our neighborhood. Emphasis is on the tendency to act, not the actual acting; what we intend and what we do may be quite different. Attitudes are our positive and negative evaluation of a situation or object. Attitudes can be divided into three distinct components the cognitive, affective and the behavioral. They may take the form of the implicit attitude, explicit attitude and the dual attitude. The components of attitudes are the cognitive which helps people structure the world to make sense to them, the affective which helps people cope with emotional conflicts and the behavior helps people achieve rewards and gain approval from others. One way that attitudes can be formed is through the classical conditioning theory. Classical conditioning is “learning through association when a neutral conditioned stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus that naturally produces an emotional response” (Franzoi 2010,p.157). Classical Conditioning is the affective component of attitudes. An example of classical conditioning would be “the soft click of the switch that turns on a noisy bathroom fan would have little effect on your behavior. After the click a conditioned has been paired with a loud noise an unconditioned on several occasions you might begin to react to the click alone conditioned response”
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