Evaluate the knowledge on attitudes that has been offered by the cognitive-experimental perspective.

Essay by tinytinUniversity, Bachelor'sB+, December 2007

download word file, 6 pages 2.3

Most people assume that what we think or feel internally would influence how we act eternally - that attitudes influence behavior. Attitudes and behaviors are quite often predictably related in certain circumstances. Yet the influences of individuals' attitude could never summarize all human behavior. In fact, empirical research illustrated that there are other factors, such as situational and contextual influences, account for behavior. This essay aims to evaluate the knowledge on attitudes that has been offered by the cognitive-experimental perspective. The starting point will be examining the definition of attitude, quantified measures and researches that have been taken to deal with attitude-behavior linkage; and why attitude fail to predict behavior. Then, the model of planned behavior would also be examined before going over the strength and weaknesses of the cognitive-experimental approach to investigate attitudes.

Attitudes are sets of preferences & tastes, with evaluative judgment, that vary between individuals. (Potter, p.

I 22-123) Attitudes is cultural and contextual bounded, which would change over time, for instance, it concerned originally with the posture in the l5th century, and later developed to imply a position or expression of the speaker. And according to McGuire, (1985, cited by Potter, p. 123) the emergence of the notion of attitude was closely related to social and political system, especially the democracy ideology, in which the public consents is crucial for ruling. Besides, attitudes developed in the individualistic culture where consumer capitalism flourishes, and were made minimal under dictatorship. (Ibid, p-123-124)A more popular and technical definition of attitude was provided by Zanna andRempel, (1988) that attitude is the categorization of a stimulus object along an evaluative dimension, which deduced from cognitive information, affective emotional information, and / or past experiences (cited by Potter, p. 124). In other words, the formation of an attitude is starting with categorization...