Sunday 24 December 2006

Attitude

Attitude


This is my good friend, Chandra. This picture was taken in Trinity's Library discussion room. It had blinds facing the Melbourne University's soccer field. I zoomed through my lens while the picture was taken to create the seemingly "sucking" effect. The picture had been tilted to brings out the extreme in the "attitudeness" and also to straighten the overall picture (blinds). I must mention that this is his normal behavior when he does not get enough sleep.



Attitude is a concept in psychology. Attitudes are positive, negative or neutral views of an "attitude object": i.e. a person, behaviour or event. People can also be "ambivalent" towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative bias towards the attitude in question.

Attitudes can be changed through persuasion. The celebrated work of Carl Hovland, at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to advance knowledge of persuasion. In Hovland's view, we should understand attitude change as a response to communication. He and his colleagues did experimental research into the factors that can affect the persuasiveness of a message:

  1. Target Characteristics: These are characteristics that refer to the person who receives and processes a message. One such is intelligence - it seems that more intelligent people are less easily persuaded by one-sided messages. Another variable that has been studied in this category is self esteem. Although it is sometimes thought that those higher in self-esteem are less easily persuaded, there is some evidence that the relationship between self-esteem and persuasibility is actually curvilinear, with people of moderate self-esteem being more easily persuaded than both those of high and low self-esteem levels (Rhodes & Woods, 1992). The mind frame and mood of the target also plays a role in this process.
  2. Source Characteristics: The major source characteristics are expertise, trustworthiness and attractiveness. The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a key variable here (Hovland & Weiss, 1951); if one reads a report on health and believes it comes from a professional medical journal, one may be more easily persuaded than if one believes it is from a popular newspaper. Some psychologists have debated whether this is a long-lasting effect and Hovland and Weiss (1951) found the effect of telling people that a message came from a credible source disappeared after several weeks (the so-called "sleeper effect"). Whether there is a sleeper effect is controversial. Received wisdom is that if people are informed of the source of a message before hearing it, there is less likelihood of a sleeper effect than if they are told a message and then told its source.
  3. Message Characteristics: The nature of the message plays a role in persuasion. Sometimes presenting both sides of a story is useful to help change attitudes.
  4. Cognitive Routes: A message can appeal to an individual's cognitive evaluation to help change an attitude. In the central route to persuasion the individual is presented with the data and motivated to evaluate the data and arrive at an attitude changing conclusion. In the peripheral route to attitude change, the individual is encouraged to not look at the content but at the source. This is commonly seen in modern advertisements that feature celebrities. In some cases, doctors and experts are used. In other cases film stars are used for their attractiveness.
(courtesy of wikipedia.com)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

U have problem??
hehehe...
kurang ajar!!!!!!!!
firstly, u dont have to add that last sentence (tho it is a fact..hoho)
secondly, the title is just wrong with my picture on it...well, sometimes i am an attitude boy(emm,man!)..

just kidding...cheers

De Foto said...

Haha.. no problem sir!
well.. what it is is what it is. hehe.. But you look very mean in the picture too. haha. who says your are still a boy?