How are attitudes formed?

In the last blog, we looked at cognitive dissonance and understood the source of such a dissonance. In today's blog, we look at how we form attitudes.

When we reflect on the way we have learnt, we begin to see two distinct manners - one, where we have had direct experiences and second where we learn by observing others and then trying out ourselves.

Our first few experience with mathematics, the experience which our teachers created for us when we learnt science, or the questions they asked in the exams in history really made our attitude towards these subjects. There were direct experiences in childhood that we carry even today. Such experiences derived from personal experience are stronger, held confidently, and are found to be more resistant than the ones we pick up from indirect experience (those that were just told and believed in by us)

The second type of learning occurs when we look at our own surroundings - we observer our parents, friends, seniors etc We create "models" in our mind of these people and attempt to create our attitudes by merely observing others. This process of observing and creating our attitude generally would have 4 processes in it:

1. We would focus and observe our model
2. What is observed is retained in our mind
3. We as learners practice what we observed as a behavior
4. We are constantly motivated to learn from such a model.

Having shown that we have 2 broad ways in which we learn an attitude, it would be extremely important to understand that society we live in and the cultural context of our operation have a major influence on the way we form our attitudes.