Psychology 2070A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Health Care In Canada, Tim Hortons, Theory Of Planned Behavior
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Attitude: an individual"s evaluation of a target along a good-bad dimension. By calling it evaluation: theorists mean that an attitude is a good-bad judgment. It represents he individual"s overall assessment of whether a particular target is + or . Social psychologists have identified the 3 elements just described: affect, cognition, and past behaviour. Both directions of influence can occur, which can be confusing for students learning about attitudes. Attitudes can have three components or sources; feelings, beliefs, and past behaviours. When, as in these examples, attitudes contain conflicting elements (both + and - ) called ambivalent attitudes: many people do not like attitudinal ambivalence the conflict among the attitudinal elements experienced as unpleasant. If an individual has both + and negative feelings/thoughts about another person, will the individual"s behaviour be constant or variable toward the other. If you said variable, you predicted what has been found by social psychologists.