The Nature of Attitudes, Beliefs, and Values

Some attitude theorists consider that attitudes have three components: evaluations, beliefs, and behavioral intentions. So what is relation between the attitudes itself with beliefs and values? A brief summary about the nature of attitudes, the nature of beliefs, and the nature of values.

The Nature of Attitudes

                If we ask someone, “What is your attitude toward, say, open housing?” he or she will most likely reply with, “I like it somewhat,” or “I dislike it very much,” or “In some ways I like it very much; in others I really dislike it.” In other words, people typically respond to a request for an attitude with an avaluation and indicate their degree of positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent feelings. Our definition of attitude is consistent with such responses: attitudes are our evaluations of objects, our “likes and dislikes,” or, in Daryl Bem’s words, our “affinities for and our aversions to objects” (1970, p. 14). The objects of attitudes can vary. They can be tangible objects (Persian rugs, chairs, homes, Cadillacs), people (my roommate, the President, my mother), groups (Republicans, Eskimos, ghosts), abstract ideas (democracy, consistency, tolerance), or behaviors (smoking, sexual preferences, mountain climbing).

                Closely associated with attitudes are our beliefs and our behaviors or intentions toward these objects. Indeed, the association of attitudes with beliefs and behaviors is so strong that we can often infer a person’s attitude toward something if we know a person’s beliefs about or behavior toward it: “What is my attitude toward open housing? Well, I believe, that it is a violation of my personal freedom to sell to whomever I choose.” (Inference: this person has a negative attiude toward open housing.) Or, “Strange you should ask. I was just about to write my congresswoman to urge a new law protecting the rights of gays and other minorities to purchase housing.” (Inference: this person’s intended behavior indicates a positive attitude toward open housing.) Some attitude theorists consider that attitudes have three components: evaluations, beliefs, and behavioral intentions. We find it more appropriate to limit our definition of attitudes to evaluiations, while we recognize that our evaluations of people and other objects may be very much affected by what we believe about them. Although behavior is not included as part of our definition of attitude, we recognize that attitudes must carry with them certain tendencies toward behavior. If we like something, we may tend to behave so as to support it or get closer to it—if we favor open housing, then we will do things to make it more likely or effective, or associate ourselves with movements that support it; if we dislike open housing, we will tend to avoid it, or do things which oppose it. Note that we are careful to say “tend to” support or oppose it, since we all know that we don’t always carry through on our intentions.

                The Nature of Beliefs

                Beliefs are what we know about an object or what we think we know about it. We may believe several things about the object “open housing”: it promotes equality, it brings government interference, it is supported by liberals, and so forth. A belief links an object to an attribute (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). Just as we may believe that open housing has the attributes of equality or government interference, we may also believe that love has attribute of “eternalness,” that Vitamin C has the attribute of preventing colds, that “2 + 2” has the attribute of “four-ness.” Thus beliefs, although they are not directly evaluative, may contribute toward our evaluation of objects: if we believe that open housing is associated with equality, and we place a strong positive value on equality, then we will tend to have a positive attitude toward open housing.

                The Nature of Values

                Central attitudes about what is desirable or what is right or wrong are called values. Central values form a core for many of our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors and may “influence judgments and actions beyond an immediate or specific situation or goal by providing an abstract frame of reference for perceiving and organizing experience and for choosing among courses of action” (Levitin, 1973).

                Perhaps because central values may be so firmly embedded, social psychologists have sometimes despaired of performing significant research on them. They may also have felt reluctant to tamper with something as deeply and personally felt as a value. Thus most research in the area has focused either on listing and determining basic values or an individual differences in the importance and strength of various values. For example, students with different majors and people from different occupational and national groups have been shown to hold different values (Allport, Vernon, and Lindzey, 1960).

(Source: Raven, Bertram H., Rubin, Jeffrey Z. 1983. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 2nd Edition. United States of America: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

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