Attitude, Behavior and Attribution
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Attitude, Behavior and Attribution
According to the Theory of Planned behavior, when one has a negative attitude towards a particular individual or group, their treatment is negative as well. For instance, when one is asked to execute a duty with a person that one has a negative attitude towards, performance of the task will be poor while it will be favorable when it is with another person. With a negative attitude toward a person or group, the implication of one’s behavior to such a person is usually cold. According to the cognitive dissonance theory, with a negative attitude towards a group, the behavior would be negative since one is not prepared to associate with such a group. For instance, to make the attitude remain consistent about such a group, one may perform poorly when forced to work in such a group in order to justify one’s attitude. On the other hand, self-perception theory comes from the individual’s knowledge and experience. These are attitudes that people gain from their own perception about others depending on observation. Implicit attitudes are not conscious, and a person cannot control them. For instance, a negative attitude could be out of forgotten experience with the person. On to the contrary, explicit attitudes are conscious, deliberate, social as well as personal values and self-report.
Attribution is the process through which people infer the cause of an event. People use them daily to explain the cause of a certain event or outcome. For instance, after losing a soccer match, a fun could say that the field was too slippery or the referee was biased in order to explain why they lost. Internal attribution means a person infers the cause of behavior from something about them-self while external means inferring the outcome to an external cause. The fundamental attribution error is like blaming other people for their misfortune. For instance, if a girl is raped, a person could say that she caused it on herself for inappropriate dressing. Fundamental attribution error is the tendency of people to attribute outcomes to internal factors such as behavior, characters and personality and never considering external factors as the attribute. The explanatory style of a person who makes internal attributions to explain positive behavior, while making external attribution to explain negative outcomes, would be one that has self-praises and one that passes blame on other factors. On the other hand, a person who does the opposite of this would be a person who is never confident and sure of what they do. Thus, anything positive they infer to someone or a situation while they blame themselves for the negative outcomes.