Attitude

What the official syllabus says

General Studies IV (Paper-V):

Attitude: content, structure, function; its influence and relation with thought and behaviour; moral and political attitudes; social influence and persuasion.

Topics in detail

Meaning and content of attitude

• Attitude as a learned, fairly lasting evaluation (favourable or unfavourable) of a person, object, group, idea or event.
• Attitude compared with belief, value, opinion and behaviour.
• Features of attitudes: direction (positive or negative), strength, centrality, accessibility, explicit and implicit attitudes.
• Formation of attitudes: direct experience, classical and operant conditioning, observational learning, family, peers, media, culture.

Structure of attitude

• The three-component (ABC) model: affective (feelings), behavioural (tendency to act) and cognitive (beliefs and thoughts).
• Consistency and inconsistency between the three components.
• Ambivalent attitudes: holding positive and negative views of the same object.

Functions of attitude

• Utilitarian or adjustive function: helping a person gain rewards and avoid punishment.
• Knowledge function: organising and simplifying information about the world.
• Ego-defensive function: protecting self-image.
• Value-expressive function: expressing one’s values and identity.
• Social-adjustive function: fitting in with valued groups.

Attitude, thought and behaviour

• How attitudes shape perception, attention, memory and reasoning (selective perception, confirmation bias).
• The attitude–behaviour gap: why people do not always act on their attitudes.
• Factors that make attitudes predict behaviour: strength, specificity, direct experience, social pressure, perceived control.
• Theory of reasoned action and theory of planned behaviour (attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control).
• Cognitive dissonance: discomfort from inconsistency between beliefs and actions, and how people reduce it.
• Self-perception: inferring one’s attitudes from one’s own behaviour.
• Changing behaviour to change attitudes, and changing attitudes to change behaviour.

Moral attitudes

• Attitudes towards right and wrong: honesty, fairness, care for others, respect for rules.
• Moral development: stages of moral reasoning (pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional) in Kohlberg’s theory; the ethics of care.
• Moral attitudes in administration: attitude towards corruption, towards the poor, towards rule-breaking by the powerful.

Political attitudes

• Attitudes towards the state, authority, democracy, rights and duties, and political participation.
• Political socialisation: family, school, media, political parties, social movements.
• Liberal, conservative and radical orientations; ideology and identity.
• Political attitudes of civil servants: neutrality, commitment to the Constitution rather than to a party.
• Polarisation, intolerance and their effects on governance.

Prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination

• Stereotype (belief), prejudice (attitude) and discrimination (behaviour) distinguished.
• Prejudice based on caste, religion, gender, region, disability.
• Reducing prejudice: contact between groups, education, common goals, laws and institutional rules.

Social influence

• Conformity: going along with the group; Asch’s line-judgement experiments; informational and normative influence.
• Compliance: yielding to a direct request; foot-in-the-door and door-in-the-face techniques.
• Obedience to authority: Milgram’s experiments; dangers of blind obedience in organisations.
• Groupthink and group polarisation; diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect.
• Social norms and their power to change behaviour (sanitation, littering, tax compliance).

Persuasion

• Elements of persuasion: the source (credibility, expertise, attractiveness), the message (one-sided or two-sided, reason or emotion, fear appeals) and the audience (prior views, involvement).
• The elaboration likelihood model: the central route (strong arguments) and the peripheral route (cues such as the speaker’s fame).
• Resistance to persuasion: reactance, inoculation, forewarning.
• Persuasion in public administration: awareness campaigns, behaviour change communication, nudges.
• Ethical limits: persuasion compared with propaganda, manipulation and misinformation.

Overlaps

• Attitudes of a civil servant are taken further under Aptitude and Foundational Values.
• Communalism, regionalism and secularism are also in General Studies I (Indian society).