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Attitude is a key concept in social psychology. In academic psychology
parlance, attitudes are positive or negative views of an "attitude
object": a person, behaviour, or event. Research has shown
that people can also be "ambivalent" towards a target,
meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative
attitude towards it. There is also a great deal of new research
emerging on "implicit" attitudes, which are essentially
attitudes that people are not consciously aware of, but that can
be revealed through sophisticated experiments using people's response
times to stimuli (how quickly they can make judgements about them).
Implicit and "explicit" attitudes (i.e. the ones people
report when they consciously ask themselves how much they like a
thing) both seem to affect people's behaviour, although in different
ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although
in some cases they are. The exact relationship between them is not
currently well understood.
Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function
of experience, and there are numerous theories of attitude formation
and attitude change, including:
- Dissonance-reduction
theory, associated with Leon Festinger
- Self-perception
theory, associated with Daryl Bem
- Persuasion
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