Attitude

Abstract

An attitude, which MeSH classifies under behavior and behavior mechanisms, is a learned, relatively enduring evaluation of an object, person, group, or idea that disposes a person to respond favorably or unfavorably toward it. This article surveys the tripartite structure of attitudes in affect, behavior, and cognition; the dimensions of attitude strength, accessibility, and ambivalence; the long-studied and often loose relationship between attitudes and behavior, from LaPiere's field study to the MODE model and the theory of planned behavior; the dual-route account of persuasion in the elaboration likelihood model and the role of cognitive dissonance; and the distinction between explicit and implicit attitudes. Three interactive demonstrations let a reader explore the two routes to persuasion, when an attitude guides behavior, and the weighted prediction of intention.

Keywords: attitude, persuasion, attitude strength, implicit attitude, attitude-behavior relation

An attitude is a psychological tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). The entity evaluated is the attitude object — anything that can be held in mind and judged, from a brand of coffee to a political party to oneself. Gordon Allport famously called the attitude the most distinctive and indispensable concept in social psychology, and the construct has remained central because it links what people feel and believe to what they are likely to do. Three features recur across definitions: an attitude is learned rather than innate, it is evaluative — it carries a valence from positive to negative — and it is relatively enduring, persisting across situations in a way that a momentary mood does not (Bohner & Dickel, 2011). Attitudes serve recognizable psychological functions: Daniel Katz argued that they can be instrumental (maximizing reward and minimizing punishment), knowledge-organizing (giving structure to a complex world), value-expressive (affirming a person's central values), and ego-defensive (protecting self-esteem), and that the same attitude may serve different functions for different people (Katz, 1960).

Types of Attitude

The Medical Subject Headings vocabulary files Attitude (D001290) directly beneath behavior and behavior mechanisms in tree F01.100 and lists ten narrower descriptors under it, shown in Table 1. These subtypes reflect indexing practice rather than a scientific taxonomy of attitude: MeSH is a controlled vocabulary built for retrieving literature, so its subheadings mark the attitude objects the biomedical literature most often indexes — health, death, computers, one's own prognosis — not a theory of how attitudes are organized in the mind. The categories are not mutually exclusive, and a single study may be indexed under several. None of these subtypes yet has its own article on this site, so each is glossed from its ordinary psychological meaning.

The Structure of Attitudes

The most influential analysis of what an attitude is made of is the tripartite or ABC model, which distinguishes three classes of evaluative response: affect (feelings and emotions toward the object), behavior (past actions and behavioral intentions regarding it), and cognition (beliefs and thoughts about its attributes) (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). On this view an attitude toward recycling, for instance, draws on how recycling feels, what a person has done about it, and what they believe its consequences to be. Figure 1 shows the three components converging on a single summary evaluation that in turn disposes the three classes of response.

Attitudes are formed through several routes. Direct experience with an object tends to produce stronger, more accessible attitudes than second-hand information. Mere repeated exposure to a neutral stimulus is itself sufficient to increase liking for it, even without any reinforcement — Robert Zajonc's mere-exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968). Attitudes are also learned through classical and operant conditioning, through observation of others, and through the explicit communication of beliefs. Because the three components can be acquired by different routes, they are often only loosely consistent, and much of attitude theory concerns what happens when they conflict.

Attitude Strength and Accessibility

Not all attitudes are equal. Attitude strength refers to the durability and impactfulness of an attitude: strong attitudes resist change, persist over time, and guide perception and behavior, whereas weak attitudes do none of these reliably (Howe & Krosnick, 2017). Strength is not a single quantity but a family of related properties — importance, certainty, extremity, how much knowledge supports the attitude, and how accessible it is. Accessibility is the ease and speed with which an attitude is activated from memory on encountering the object, operationalized as the latency to report an evaluation; Russell Fazio showed that attitudes formed through direct experience are more accessible and that highly accessible attitudes are activated automatically on mere exposure to the object (Fazio et al., 1986). A further strength-related property is ambivalence: holding both positive and negative evaluations of the same object at once, so that the net attitude is weak even though both components are strong. These properties matter because they moderate nearly every downstream effect of an attitude — which is the subject of the next two sections.

The Attitude–Behavior Relation

The assumption that attitudes predict behavior was challenged early and hard. In a landmark field study, Richard LaPiere traveled the United States with a young Chinese couple and was refused service at only one of some 250 establishments, yet when he later wrote to the same establishments asking whether they would serve Chinese guests, over 90% of those replying said they would not (LaPiere, 1934). The expressed attitude and the actual behavior diverged sharply. Reviewing decades of such studies, Allan Wicker concluded that attitudes and overt behavior were often only weakly related, and that it was more plausible that the two were largely independent than that attitudes strongly determined action (Wicker, 1969). This attitude-behavior gap threatened the usefulness of the entire construct.

The resolution came not from abandoning attitudes but from specifying when they predict behavior. The principle of compatibility holds that attitudes predict behavior well only when both are measured at the same level of specificity: a general attitude toward the environment predicts the aggregate of many environmentally relevant actions, but a specific behavior (recycling this week) is predicted by a specific attitude (toward recycling this week). Fazio's MODE model adds a process account: attitudes guide behavior through two distinct pathways depending on Motivation and Opportunity to Deliberate. When motivation and opportunity are high, behavior follows from a deliberate weighing of costs and benefits; when they are low, behavior is driven spontaneously by whichever attitude is automatically activated, so accessible attitudes dominate exactly when there is no time to think (Fazio et al., 1986). The demonstration below lets a reader vary an attitude's accessibility and the opportunity to deliberate and watch the predicted correspondence between attitude and behavior rise and fall.

active route: spontaneous — behavior follows the automatically activated attitude

The MODE model holds that an attitude reaches behavior along either of two routes. Give the person time and motivation to think (high opportunity) and behavior follows a deliberate weighing, so correspondence is high whatever the attitude's accessibility. Remove that opportunity and only an automatically activated — that is, highly accessible — attitude still steers behavior. Correspondence collapses only when the attitude is both inaccessible and there is no chance to deliberate, which is why accessible attitudes matter most exactly when there is no time to think (Fazio et al., 1986).

The most influential deliberate-processing account is Icek Ajzen's theory of planned behavior (TPB), which extends the earlier theory of reasoned action he developed with Martin Fishbein by adding a third determinant to it. The theory holds that behavior follows from an intention, and that intention is itself a weighted combination of three determinants: the person's attitude toward the behavior, the subjective norm (perceived social pressure), and perceived behavioral control (the sense of being able to perform it), the last being the addition that distinguishes it from the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen, 1991). The weights vary across behaviors and populations, so the theory is a framework for prediction rather than a fixed equation; perceived control additionally predicts behavior directly, because believing one can act matters over and above wanting to (Ajzen, 2020). The Worked Example below computes an intention from the three determinants, and the third demonstration lets a reader set them directly.

Attitude Change and Persuasion

If attitudes can change, how? The dominant answer is the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of Richard Petty and John Cacioppo, a dual-process theory of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). The model proposes that persuasion proceeds along two routes depending on the recipient's elaboration likelihood — their motivation and ability to think carefully about the message. Under the central route, taken when elaboration is high, the recipient scrutinizes the arguments, and attitude change depends on argument quality; the resulting attitudes are strong, persistent, and predictive of behavior. Under the peripheral route, taken when elaboration is low, the recipient relies on simple cues — source attractiveness, expertise, the sheer number of arguments — and the resulting change is weaker and more transient. The same variable can play different roles at different elaboration levels, a point the first demonstration makes concrete by letting a reader set motivation and ability and watch which of argument quality or peripheral cue drives the predicted change.

dominant route: central — change driven by argument quality
resulting attitude: durable, resists counterargument

Elaboration requires both the motivation and the ability to think about a message, so raising either alone does little. When elaboration is high the central route dominates and the quality of the argument drives a durable change; when it is low the peripheral route takes over and a simple cue — source attractiveness or sheer number of arguments — does the work, leaving a weaker, more transient attitude (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

A second major mechanism of change is internal rather than external. Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance holds that holding two inconsistent cognitions — or acting in a way that contradicts an attitude — produces an aversive state of dissonance that people are motivated to reduce, often by changing the attitude to fit the behavior (Festinger, 1957). The classic demonstration is induced compliance: people paid only a trivial sum to say something they do not believe come to believe it more than people paid a large sum, because the large payment is sufficient external justification and so leaves no dissonance to resolve. Dissonance makes attitude change a route to consistency, not only a response to persuasion. Broad reviews treat persuasion, dissonance, and the dual-process architecture as complementary parts of a single account of how evaluations form and change (Bohner & Dickel, 2011; Albarracín & Shavitt, 2018).

Implicit and Explicit Attitudes

A person can sincerely report one evaluation while behaving as though they held another. This observation motivated the distinction between explicit attitudes — deliberately reported and consciously endorsed — and implicit attitudes — evaluations that are automatically activated and that may be difficult to report or even to acknowledge. The most widely used measure of the latter is the Implicit Association Test (IAT) of Anthony Greenwald and colleagues, which infers the relative strength of associations between concepts from the speed of sorting them into shared response keys (Greenwald et al., 1998). The associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model of Bertram Gawronski and Galen Bodenhausen gives these two attitudes a process interpretation: implicit evaluations are the output of fast associative processes, explicit evaluations are propositional judgments that may endorse or reject the associative output, and the two change through different interventions (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006).

How well implicit measures predict behavior is actively contested. A large meta-analysis by Benedek Kurdi and colleagues found that IAT scores correlate with intergroup behavior only weakly, and that the implicit–explicit and implicit–behavior relations are both modest and highly heterogeneous across studies (Kurdi et al., 2019). Bertram Gawronski has argued that much popular discussion of implicit bias outruns the evidence — that an implicit measure is not a window onto a hidden true attitude, that individual IAT scores are too unreliable for diagnostic use, and that the construct is better understood in terms of the automatic activation of associations than as unconscious prejudice (Gawronski, 2019). The distinction remains theoretically important even as its measurement and interpretation are revised.

Worked Example

The theory of planned behavior makes a quantitative prediction that can be checked with arithmetic: a behavioral intention is a weighted sum of the attitude toward the behavior, the subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control. Model the intention as I = wₓA + wₓₙSN + wₓₚ₊PBC, where A, SN, and PBC are each scored 0–100 and the weights wₓ, wₙ, and w₊ sum to 1. The weights capture how much each determinant matters for a given behavior and population; they are estimated from data, not fixed by the theory.

Consider a person deciding whether to start a regular exercise program. Suppose their attitude toward exercising is quite favorable (A = 80), the subjective norm is moderate because only some of their friends exercise (SN = 40), and their perceived behavioral control is fairly high (PBC = 70). For a behavior of this kind, attitude and control typically carry more weight than social pressure, so take wₓ = 0.5, wₙ = 0.2, and w₊ = 0.3. The predicted intention is I = 0.5 × 80 + 0.2 × 40 + 0.3 × 70 = 40 + 8 + 21 = 69 on the 0–100 scale.

Now suppose the person's circumstances change so that they no longer feel able to fit exercise into their week: perceived control falls to PBC = 30 while attitude and norm are unchanged. The predicted intention becomes I = 0.5 × 80 + 0.2 × 40 + 0.3 × 30 = 40 + 8 + 9 = 57. The favorable attitude is intact, yet the intention has dropped by twelve points, because in this framework wanting to act is not enough — the sense of being able to act carries its own weight.

The example makes the theory's structure precise: intention is not read off the attitude alone but off a weighted combination in which social pressure and perceived control each pull the prediction toward or away from action (Ajzen, 1991). The third demonstration implements exactly this computation.

weights w_A = 0.5, w_SN = 0.2, w_PBC = 0.3 — predicted outcome: likely to act

Intention is not read off the attitude alone but off a weighted combination of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived control. Set a favorable attitude (A = 80), a moderate norm (SN = 40), and high control (PBC = 70) and the intention is 69; drop control to 30 with attitude unchanged and it falls to 57, because in this framework wanting to act is not enough — the sense of being able to act carries its own weight (Ajzen, 1991).

Discussion

The arc of attitude research runs from a confident assumption, through a crisis, to a conditional synthesis. The early assumption was that attitudes straightforwardly cause behavior; LaPiere and Wicker showed that they frequently do not (LaPiere, 1934; Wicker, 1969). The synthesis was to specify the conditions — compatibility of measurement, attitude strength and accessibility, motivation and opportunity to deliberate — under which the link is strong, and to supply process models, the MODE model and the theory of planned behavior, that say how an attitude reaches behavior along deliberate and spontaneous routes (Fazio et al., 1986; Ajzen, 1991). The construct survived its crisis by becoming more precise.

The same pattern recurs for attitude change and for the explicit–implicit distinction. Persuasion is not a single process but two, selected by how much the recipient is willing and able to think, and the durability of the resulting attitude follows from which route produced it (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Implicit and explicit attitudes are doubly dissociable in principle, but the predictive power of implicit measures turned out to be more modest and more variable than early enthusiasm suggested (Kurdi et al., 2019). Across all of these literatures the recurring lesson is that an attitude is a disposition whose expression is conditional: it shapes feeling, thought, and action strongly under some circumstances and scarcely at all under others, and the science of attitudes is largely the science of those circumstances (Bohner & Dickel, 2011).

Current Directions

Two debates dominate the contemporary literature. The first concerns implicit attitudes. After two decades in which implicit measures were widely treated as revealing hidden true evaluations, careful meta-analysis and methodological critique have forced a reassessment: the correlation between implicit measures and behavior is weak and heterogeneous, the test–retest reliability of individual scores is low, and changes in implicit measures do not reliably produce changes in behavior (Kurdi et al., 2019; Gawronski, 2019). The field is converging on a more disciplined construal in which implicit measures index the automatic activation of associations under specified conditions, rather than a unitary unconscious attitude, and in which claims about diagnosing individuals from such scores are treated with caution.

The second direction is integrative and theoretical. Recent syntheses situate attitudes within a broader account of evaluation that spans the associative and propositional processes of the APE model, the construction of attitudes on the fly from accessible information, and the embedding of attitudes in social networks and communication (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Albarracín & Shavitt, 2018). The theory of planned behavior, meanwhile, continues to be refined and defended against its critics, with attention to the conditions under which adding further predictors improves prediction and to the gap between intention and action (Ajzen, 2020). The common thread is a move from asking whether attitudes matter to specifying the processes and boundary conditions through which they do.

Common Misconceptions

Attitudes reliably predict behavior.

Attitudes predict behavior only under specifiable conditions — when attitude and behavior are measured at the same specificity and when the attitude is strong and accessible. General attitudes often diverge sharply from specific acts, as LaPiere's field study first showed (LaPiere, 1934; Wicker, 1969).

An implicit test reveals a person's true, hidden attitude.

Implicit measures such as the IAT index the automatic activation of associations, not a privileged true attitude; individual scores are too unreliable for diagnosis, and they predict behavior only weakly (Kurdi et al., 2019; Gawronski, 2019).

The best way to change an attitude is a strong argument.

A strong argument changes attitudes only when the recipient is motivated and able to process it (the central route). When elaboration is low, simple peripheral cues do the work instead, and argument quality barely matters (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

Attitudes are stable once formed.

Durability is a property of attitude strength, not of attitudes in general. Weak attitudes shift readily, and even strong ones can change when a person's own behavior contradicts them, through cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957; Howe & Krosnick, 2017).

Glossary

Accessibility.

The ease and speed with which an attitude is activated from memory on encountering the object; highly accessible attitudes are activated automatically.

Ambivalence.

Holding both positive and negative evaluations of the same object simultaneously, so that the net attitude is weak despite strong components.

Attitude object.

The entity toward which an attitude is held — anything that can be held in mind and evaluated.

Attitude strength.

The durability and impactfulness of an attitude; strong attitudes resist change, persist, and guide perception and behavior.

Attitude.

A learned, relatively enduring evaluation of an object, person, group, or idea that disposes a person to respond favorably or unfavorably toward it.

Central route.

In the elaboration likelihood model, the path to persuasion taken under high elaboration, in which attitude change depends on the quality of arguments.

Cognitive dissonance.

The aversive state produced by inconsistent cognitions or by acting against an attitude, which motivates attitude change toward consistency.

Elaboration likelihood.

The recipient's motivation and ability to think carefully about a persuasive message, which determines whether the central or peripheral route is taken.

Explicit attitude.

An evaluation that a person deliberately reports and consciously endorses, typically measured by self-report.

Implicit Association Test (IAT).

A reaction-time measure that infers the relative strength of associations between concepts from the speed of sorting them into shared response keys.

Implicit attitude.

An evaluation that is automatically activated and may be hard to report, often measured indirectly by response latency as in the IAT.

Mere-exposure effect.

The increase in liking for a stimulus produced by repeated exposure alone, without reinforcement or even recognition.

MODE model.

Fazio's account in which attitudes guide behavior deliberately when motivation and opportunity are high and spontaneously, through automatic activation, when they are low.

Peripheral route.

In the elaboration likelihood model, the path to persuasion taken under low elaboration, in which simple cues rather than argument quality drive change.

Principle of compatibility.

The rule that attitudes predict behavior well only when both are assessed at the same level of specificity (action, target, context, time).

Subjective norm.

In the theory of planned behavior, a person's perception of social pressure to perform or not perform a behavior.

Theory of planned behavior.

Ajzen's model in which behavioral intention is a weighted combination of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control.

Tripartite (ABC) model.

The analysis of an attitude into affective, behavioral, and cognitive components, which need not be mutually consistent.

Key Researchers

Icek Ajzen

(b. 1942). Professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; with Martin Fishbein he developed the theory of reasoned action and then the theory of planned behavior, the dominant expectancy-value account of how attitudes predict intention and behavior. Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Dolores Albarracín

(b. 1968). Professor at the University of Pennsylvania; she leads contemporary meta-analytic and theoretical work on attitudes, persuasion, and the attitude-behavior relation. Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Gordon W. Allport

(1897-1967). Psychologist at Harvard University; he called the attitude the most indispensable concept in social psychology and shaped its early definition as a mental and neural state of readiness. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Alice H. Eagly

(b. 1938). Professor at Northwestern University; with Shelly Chaiken she wrote The Psychology of Attitudes, the standard scholarly treatment of attitude structure, formation, and change. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Russell H. Fazio

(b. 1952). Professor at Ohio State University; he demonstrated the automatic activation of attitudes from memory and built the MODE model of when attitudes guide behavior. Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Leon Festinger

(1919-1989). Psychologist at Stanford University; he introduced the theory of cognitive dissonance, the account of attitude change driven by the motivation to reduce inconsistency among cognitions. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Bertram Gawronski

(b. 1971). Professor at the University of Texas at Austin; with Galen Bodenhausen he developed the associative-propositional evaluation model distinguishing implicit from explicit attitudes. Google Scholar - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Richard E. Petty

(b. 1951). Professor at Ohio State University; with John Cacioppo he formulated the elaboration likelihood model, the dual-route theory of persuasion. Google Scholar - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an attitude in psychology?

An attitude is a learned, relatively enduring evaluation of an object, person, group, or idea that disposes a person to respond favorably or unfavorably toward it. It is evaluative, acquired through experience, and more stable than a passing mood (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993).

What are the three components of an attitude?

The tripartite or ABC model analyzes an attitude into affect (feelings toward the object), behavior (actions and intentions regarding it), and cognition (beliefs about it). The three components can diverge, so an attitude may be affectively positive yet cognitively negative (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993).

Do attitudes predict behavior?

Only under specifiable conditions. Attitudes predict behavior well when both are measured at the same level of specificity and when the attitude is strong and accessible; general attitudes often diverge from specific actions (LaPiere, 1934; Wicker, 1969).

What is the theory of planned behavior?

It is Ajzen's model in which behavior follows from an intention, and intention is a weighted combination of the attitude toward the behavior, the subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control, with control also predicting behavior directly (Ajzen, 1991).

What are the two routes to persuasion?

The elaboration likelihood model proposes a central route, taken when motivation and ability are high, in which argument quality drives change, and a peripheral route, taken when they are low, in which simple cues such as source expertise drive change (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

What is cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance is the aversive state produced by holding inconsistent cognitions or acting against an attitude; people reduce it by changing the attitude to fit the behavior, which makes dissonance a route to attitude change (Festinger, 1957).

What is the difference between implicit and explicit attitudes?

Explicit attitudes are deliberately reported and consciously endorsed, while implicit attitudes are automatically activated and may be hard to report; the two can diverge, and implicit attitudes are typically measured indirectly, as by the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998).

Does the Implicit Association Test reveal hidden prejudice?

The evidence counsels caution. IAT scores predict intergroup behavior only weakly and vary greatly across studies, and individual scores are too unreliable for diagnosing a person, so the test is better read as indexing automatic associations than hidden true attitudes (Kurdi et al., 2019; Gawronski, 2019).

References