When a person behaves or reacts in a negative way to an event, we say that the person has a ‘bad attitude’ or ‘negative attitude’ to that event. The concept of attitude has been in common usage for so long but few people actually know what goes into the creation of a person’s attitude.

If you want to understand how attitudes are born and how these evolve over time, we have to go to into an in-depth exploration of social attitudes and how attitudes related to individuals and to society itself. But first off, what is attitude?

Social psychology defines attitude as a collection of beliefs that a person associates with a specific object.

By object, we mean anything and everything that a person can focus on, including other people, events, himself or even the behavior of other people. Each person has a distinct attitude when it comes to specific stimuli and events. Attitudes, like other personal structures of belief, are held dearly by individuals.

How Attitudes Are Formed

Social psychology has identified four key avenues of attitude formation in people. These avenues are:

Mere exposure

Associative learning

Self-perception

Functional reasons

The Key Avenues of Attitude Formation

Each key avenue is distinct because the formational coordinates are also distinct/different from each other. In mere exposure, it is believed that in order for a person to develop a more positive attitude toward a particular object (remember, an ‘object’ can be anything that a person can focus on), that person must be exposed continually to the said object.

So if you can increase the exposure of another person to an object (i.e. a product, service or business offer), the more positive that person’s attitude will be toward that particular object. This is illustrated in a study made some years ago; test subjects were exposed to characters that resembled Chinese characters.

The test subjects were told later on that the characters were actually adjectives. The subjects were then asked if they can guess which characters represented positive traits.

The study showed that the longer a person was exposed to a character, the more he associated the said character to a positive trait. A linear (or consistent upward) trend was noted in the study – which proves that repetition and continual exposure does have an impact in the way people viewed the world. This key avenue shows that people can assimilate new objects if they are exposed to the said objects long enough. So remember: the longer a person sees something, more likely he will like the said object after a time.

Another interesting study worth noting here is a joint study by Mita, Dermer and Knight. These three researchers showed test subjects two photographic prints. One print was a regular photograph of themselves while the other photograph showed mirror images of themselves.

So one image would be a regular photo while the other one represented what people saw when they looked into a mirror. After exposing the test subjects to the different prints, they were asked to choose which print they liked best.

A majority of the test respondents states that they like the mirror prints best. There was no other explanation for this trend other than the mirror prints represented what the test subjects saw more frequently in their daily life.

Though the images were almost indistinguishable from each other, the test subjects were still able to correctly identify which prints contained the mirror images.