Attitude

attitude

In psychology, a mental position with regard to a fact or state. Attitudes reflect a tendency to classify objects and events and to react to them with some consistency. Attitudes are not directly observable but rather are inferred from the objective, evaluative responses a person makes. Thus, investigators depend heavily on behavioral indicators of attitudes—what people say, how they respond to questionnaires, or such physiological signs as changes in heart rate. Attitude research is employed by social psychologists, advertising professionals, and political scientists, among others. Public-opinion researchers often attempt to distinguish attitudes from related concepts such as values, opinions, and knowledge.

---

attitude

1. Aeronautics the orientation of an aircraft's axes in relation to some plane, esp the horizontal

2. Ballet a classical position in which the body is upright and one leg raised and bent behind

---

attitude [′ad·ə‚tüd]

(aerospace engineering)

The position or orientation of an aircraft, spacecraft, and so on, either in motion or at rest, as determined by the relationship between its axes and some reference line or plane or some fixed system of reference axes.

(geology)

The position of a structural surface feature in relation to the horizontal.

(graphic arts)

The orientation of a camera or a photograph with respect to a given external reference system.

---

Attitude 

the state of subjective readiness or predisposition to a given activity in a given situation. Attitudes were first identified in 1888 by the German psychologist L. Lange, who was studying errors of perception. The Soviet psychologist D. N. Uznadze, in working out a general psychological theory of attitudes, presented experimental proof of an individual subject’s general mental readiness to respond to a need activated in a given situation (actual attitudes). Furthermore, Uznadze determined the laws governing the reinforcement of such a state of readiness through the repeated recurrence of situations in which the given need can be satisfied (fixed attitudes). According to Uznadze, attitudes accumulate past experiences and thus mediate the stimulating effect of external conditions, creating a balance between the subject and the environment.

Social attitudes have been the subject of research in the USSR (Sh. Nadirashvili and I. Gomelauri) as well as abroad, where social psychologists (for example, F. Heider, S. Asch, M. Rosenberg, and L. Festinger in the USA) attribute a fixed set of mental attitudes to the individual in relation to society. Such studies have revealed the complex structure of social attitudes, whose components are classified as affective, cognitive, and behavioral (the latter describing readiness for action)—that is, forms of perceptual and behavioral predisposition with respect to social objects and situations. It is presumably possible to distinguish, in the structure of the psyche, a hierarchical system of predispositions to action on various levels of regulation of conduct. This organized system of predispositions consists of the following categories: the most simple and unconscious attitudes toward the simplest situations and objects; the more complex social attitudes that govern social conduct; and the individual’s value orientations, which are products of the interaction between higher social needs and circumstances and which mediate the individual’s overall social behavior in different spheres of activity.

REFERENCES

Uznadze, D. N. Eksperimental’nye osnovy psikhologii ustanovki. Tbilisi, 1961.
Uznadze, D. N. Psikhologicheskie issledovaniia. Moscow, 1966.
Nadirashvili, Sh. A. Poniatie ustanovki v obshchei i sotsial’noi psikhologii. Tbilisi, 1974.
Prangishvili, A. S. Issledovaniia po psikhologii ustanovki. Tbilisi, 1967.
Shikhirev, P. N. “Issledovaniia sotsial’noi ustanovki v SShA.” Voprosy filosofii, 1973, no. 2.
Iadov, V. A. “O dispozitsionnoi reguliatsii sotsial’nogo povedeniia lichnosti.” In the collection Metodologicheskie problemy sotsial’noi psikhologii. Moscow, 1975.
Attitude Organization and Change. New Haven, 1960.
Rokeach, M. “The Nature of Attitudes.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 1. New York, 1968.
McGuire, W. J. “The Nature of Attitudes and Attitude Change.” In Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 3. Reading, 1968.

V. A. IADOV