An attitude can be
defined as a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event,
activities, ideas, or just about anything in your environment (Zimbardo et al.,
1999) In the opinion of Bain (1927), an attitude is "the relatively stable
overt behavior of a person which affects his status." "Attitudes
which are different to a group are thus social attitudes or `values' in the
Thomasonian sense. The attitude is the status-fixing behavior. This
differentiates it from habit and vegetative processes as such, and totally
ignores the hypothetical 'subjective states' which have formerly been
emphasized. It is how one judges any person, situation or object.
North (1932) has
defined attitude as "the totality of those states that lead to or point
toward some particular activity of the organism. The attitude is, therefore,
the dynamic element in human behavior, the motive for activity." For
Lumley (1928) an attitude is "a susceptibility to certain kinds of stimuli
and readiness to respond repeatedly in a given way—which are possible toward
our world and the parts of it which impinge upon us." Attitudes are
judgments. They develop on the ABC model (affect, behavior, and cognition). The affective response is an emotional response that expresses an
individual's degree of preference for an entity. The behavioral intention is a verbal indication or
typical behavioral tendency of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of
the entity that constitutes an individual's beliefs about the object. Most
attitudes are the result of either direct experience or observational learning from the environment.
