MODULE 3 - ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL PERSONALITY TRAITS

The concept of attitude is an old one in psychology; and while we tend to associate it more directly with the area of social psychology, it was an important concept in general psychology in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. It was first used in America by Franklin H. Giddings, the sociologist, and was introduced into social psychology by William I. Thomas. The first American psychologist to use the concept in a general textbook was Howard C. warren, in his Human Psychology. Both sociologists and psychologists consider attitudes inseparable from values, either personal or social. Consequently, one cannot intelligently discuss the psychology of attitudes without also examining the nature of human values.

An attitude is primarily an inner state rather than an overt expression. It is basically a tendency to act. It is a mental ‘set’, or readiness to act, not primarily the act itself. Fundamentally, then, an attitude is an implicit, response than an overt act, and it may be defined as an implicit response toward or away from an individual value or social value. It is a determining tendency, a preparatory act, and a potential adjustment toward an object, person, or state of affairs. In up-to –the minute terminology, the definitions of attitude conceive it as a trait or latent variable.

In describing an attitude as a trait, a certain caution must be observed. A trait, like an attitude, is a determining tendency or a state of readiness to responds to a pattern of stimuli; but not every trait is an attitude. Insofar as the two are distinguishable, the difference lies in the fact that an attitude always has a specific reference. To use Gordon Allport’s example, a man’s fondness for his dog is a kindly attitude toward it; but if a man generally displays thoughtfulness and sympathy toward beasts and other people, we call this disposition the trait of kindness. The difference, in short, is one of generality and specificity: an attitude usually has a specific, and a trait a general, reference. An attitude is always a stand or position, which is an individual, takes toward a person or an issue. Accordingly, one has either a positive or negative attitude toward some aspect of one’s environment; as we use the term attitude, one cannot have a neutral attitude toward as aspect of his environment. Finally, an attitude is always a pattern of ideas, motives and perceptions.

Normality and maturity of personality depend in no small way on whether the individual possesses a relatively unified system of personal and social values. Values make men’s lives meaningful and give them a sense of direction.

A value may be defined as anything that is desirable to a person. When a value arises in interaction with others and is socially conditioned, it is called a want. There is a sense in which a value may be antecedent to a want and direct the course of a want, as when we want things because they have social value, or because they are prestige bearers. An individual’s set of values, or his value schema, refers to the presuppositions by which he lives and the intentions which direct his actions along one dimension of behavior rather than another. These presuppositions and intentions serve as directive influences, or guides for individual behavior. In this way they render a person’s life relatively coherent and meaningful. This coherence and meaningfulness is especially seen in the fact that the values are usually arranged into a hierarchy, one value taking precedence over another.

On the basis of a few investigations we can say that in knowing an individual’s value hierarchy we know him better as a person.

The source of many of our motives is the more or less organized set of customs and traditions that we call culture. The values of the group are norms- that is standards by which we act and judge our own and other’s behavior. The norms of society thus serve as frames of reference, which guide our attitudes and overt actions. This relationship between group norms and individual behavior can be seen concretely in the effect of the family an of the peer group. Every normal child’s actions are formed by the dominant values of the family in which he is reared.

We learn these norms, and they become established in us as individual habits, through interpersonal contacts, imitation and suggestion, formal and informal training, and canalization - that is the progressive narrowing of our wants and needs along socially prescribed lines of thought and action. Norms are acquired in accordance with the principles of learning.

The psychology of attitudes and values has not only a scientific interest but also a very practical one, especially as it concerns both the prediction and the control of human behavior. For this reason it is important to know how attitudes are formed and changed.

The two main determinants of attitude formation and attitude change are psychological and cultural.

By psychological determinants we mean such factors as motivation, emotion, need, thinking, dominance, and submission, which play a part in originating or changing a persons attitudes. A number of studies have demonstrated that the whole personality structures, as well as personality traits like introversion and extraversion, and dominance and submission play a role in attitude formation and change. For e.g. politically radical individuals tend to be more submissive and introverted and to posses more inferiority feelings than conservatives. These individuals are less bound to convention despite their submissive tendencies, probably as a reaction to their sense of inferiority, and are freer to deviate from the established norms.

However, correlations of personality and attitudes can be misleading, since they are subject to distortion and misinterpretation. Thus it may be mistakenly inferred that all introverted and submissive people have radical ideas, and conversely, that all ascendant and extroverted individuals are conservative or reactionary. In the area of attitudes and values, as in the whole area of human behavior, relationships are almost invariably complex, so that it is dangerous to posit the existence of a direct relationship between two variables. It is particularly dangerous for a political scientist to describe every political radical as a neurotic introvert. Simple co relational investigations seldom give us true knowledge of complex human behavior. In other words, the fact that a certain psychological make-up, such as introversion, is frequently associated with a specific set of attitudes, such as political radicalism does not necessarily confirm the hypothesis that the two are essentially related. We can say only that the two are associated, no that they are causally connected.

While we have labeled in the preceding section ‘psychological’, they cannot be wholly classified in this manner. They are influenced in varying degrees by cultural norms, particularly such specific variables as social status, family environment, and education. For e.g. Catholics tend to be more conservative than Protestants on some social issues, such as recognizing Communist China or birth control, and Jews generally are inclined to be more liberal than Catholics or Protestants, irrespective of their individual personality structures.

Students with church affiliations have been found to be more conservative regarding equality of treatment of the minorities/Blacks than students with no religious preferences. Students from wealthy backgrounds have been found to be more prejudiced and more authoritarian than those of middle-class origin. In a similar manner, education is a factor in the development of attitudes. A study made by the Social Science Research Council in 1947 revealed that less educated persons more often advocated the use of atom bombs to compel other nations to submit to our country’s wishes than the better educated.

These examples indicated that cultural factors are significant determinants of human attitudes. The force of cultural norms is often effective, and is rarely disregarded by people in a group. Not only the origin, but also the persistence, of attitude arises from cultural values and norms. We hold to our attitudes and beliefs because other members of our social group also hold them. We get powerful support for and justification of our beliefs by the fact that others confirm them. There is safety in familiarity, as in numbers.

The relationship between culture and attitudes, like that between attitudes and personality, is never simple. Attitudes are always the result of the combined and interactive effect of both personality and cultural variables. Thus we hold our beliefs not only because we are conditioned to do so by our family, class membership, education, and religion, but also because we are persons who unconsciously adhere to those attitudes which are congruent with our perception of what is ‘right’ or ‘true’, which fit into the cognitive structure or preconceptions which we already possess, and because we reject whatever does not fir into our system of beliefs. Attitudes and values influenced by configurations of factors, seldom by single or isolated variables. Psychological and cultural variables always interact in producing, retaining, or changing attitudes.

Our attitudes toward other things and other people are very complex dispositions to accept or to reject. We are favorable or unfavorable towards a person, institutions, a proposal, or a social issue. The positive or negative tendency is apparent in every attitude. We are for or against something. In a general sense, mere preference based upon pleasantness or unpleasantness, an esthetic judgment or the expression of an interest, all may be called attitudes. We usually restrict the term, however, to social matters as in the following examples. The attitudes may be conscious or unconscious, verbalized or universalized, and active or inactive at the moment. For example, you may be favorably disposed towards college football as a sport. This attitude is a more or less stable set of yours that predisposed you to buy tickets to games, to talk football, and to do other things, but only when certain occasions arise.

Suppose the attitude in question is that toward capital punishment. One person you meet is strongly against it and another is strongly for it. Still another is indifferent, or if he has any feeling at all on the matter, he is rather lukewarm. This implies a scale extending form an extremely favorable attitude to an extremely unfavorable attitude, with an indifference point in the center. In many respects it is similar to the general affective scale. Each person who has acquired any sentiments on the question of capital punishment at all is probably on the favorable or the unfavorable side of the indifference point. His characteristic position on the scale can be determined in the following manner:

First, it is necessary to construct an attitude scale. An attitude scale is usually composed of a number of statements of opinion concerning the issue or institution. Attitudes are revealed to a large extent by opinions that people express or accept as their sentiment. If a person says concerning capital punishment in all seriousness, “Every criminal should be executed”, you conclude that he is decidedly in favor of it. If another person says that: “it is a disgrace to civilized society”, he is very much against it. Neither statement alone would enable us to place a person very accurately on the scale.

We therefore collect a large number of potentially usable statements, which seem to be distributed all along the scale of favorable and unfavorable opinion. In one method, we ask a number of competent judges to evaluate each statement on a scale of eleven steps. The average step value for each statement is the indication of the scale position of the statement. We then select some 20 to 25 statement of opinion that are about equally spaced along the scale and that seem pertinent and clear. These statements then make up our yardstick for measuring the scale positions of individuals and groups.

As an example of opinions that have been evaluated for strength of opinion about capital punishment, the following statements and their scale values may suffer: An individuals position on the scale is determined by asking him to state which opinions he himself believes. An average of the scale values of the opinions to which he subscribes paces him at some point on the scale. Thurstone and his associates have prepared similar attitude scales for, such social factors as communism, prohibition, and patriotism, war, the law, belief in evolution, censorship, birth control, the Bible, God and the church. These serve as measuring instruments for the study of the causal factors of attitudes and of changes in attitudes.

Certain changes in attitudes have been very neatly, detected by means of attitude scales. For example, the children in 2 different schools were given scales concerning their approval or disapproval; of the Chinese. One School was then shown a motion picture favorable to the Chinese and the other was shown a film that was unfavorable. In the first, there was a decided shift of opinion of the Chinese in the more favorable direction.

By using the method of comparisons, study was made concerning the effect of a motion picture entitled “Street of Chance” upon children’s attitudes toward gamblers, who were shown in an unfavorable light in the film. 13 names of crimes were presented, each paired with very other one, both before and after showing the picture. The children were asked to say which one pair was the more serious or wrong. All the crimes except gambling kept almost exactly the same scale positions. Gambling rose definitely toward the more serious end of the scale. Whether or not these measured changes in attitude are permanent dies not concern us here. No doubt most attitudes are continually shifting towards under the pressure of challenging conditions.

The point is that we have the necessary psychological instruments for measuring the attitudes of individuals and of groups. Thus we can make a scientific or a practical study of their changes and of their causal factors.

Modern public-opinion polling is designed to assess the general level of attitude of groups of many issues of current importance. The questions asked may concern political, military, religious, commercial, or economic questions of the day. The result is usually given in terms of percentages that favor or do not favor each proposition.

As we pointed out earlier, attitudes are always directed toward values, in the form of objects, persons, or situations. An important object toward which attitude are directed consists of people who comprise in-groups or out-groups, or people whom we accept or reject. This acceptance or rejection of persons on the basis of their group relationships is popularly called prejudice, an attitude based on racial, cultural, or ideological differences. Many of our avoidances, aversions, and aggressions, whether overt or merely verbal, are rooted in the biased attitudes, myths stereotypes, and negative ideas concerning others. These avoidances, aversions, and aggressions seldom have rational or factual basis, but are an expression of a general tendency to be suspicious of whatever is different from the conventional and the familiar.

Although the term prejudice is much more widely than ethnic attitude, in the interest of scientific clarity the latter term is preferable. The term prejudice is seldom clearly defined and is too often exclusively associated with the popular term of rejection of or hostility toward certain people or ideas. Accordingly, psychology would do much better to use the term ethnic attitude. The reason for this preference is simple; ethnic attitudes originate in provincialism, in ethnocentrism. An ethnocentric individual rejects people not only on racial grounds but also on basis of cultural difference. Again, prejudice is an antipathy for a specific group, whereas ethnocentrism is a relatively enduring and consistent attitude towards anyone whom is different. Ethnocentrism implies acceptance as well as rejection. Thus we accept members of the in-group and reject members of the out-group. More specifically, ethnocentrism and the ethnic attitudes to which it gives rise cannot a change of emphasis from racial to more inclusive ethnic or cultural differences.

One of the clearest features of ethnocentrism is its all-encompassing character. The ethnocentric individually will reject anyone who does not belong to the in-group. Any group that seems threatening because of its “alien” character belongs in the out-group., and anyone belonging to the out-group must be rejected. The ethnocentric person thus deals with persons categorically, not individually; they are not persons but members of a group-on out-group toward which he feels hostile.

The ethnocentric person easily mixes and overlaps his ethnic categories. For example, in international relations, as some studies show, the ethnocentric American will be suspicious and hostile toward other nations, but in relation to his own country he will be chauvinistic, while at the same time he will reject other Americans on ethnocentric grounds---for example, because they are Catholics. Thus within his own country he will reject various religious and other groups---Negroes, Jews, radicals, and so on.

Again the ethnocentric’s categorical relation to others, his strong tendency to form in-group—out-group attitudes, and his need for scapegoats prevent him from establishing any sympathetic relations with humanity as a whole. He cannot easily relate himself to individuals as individuals, but instead approaches them only as members of group, which he rejects. This attitude often results in a cynical view of human nature. But because even the ethnocentric individual cannot live with himself in full consciousness of his hostility toward members of the out-group, he finds it necessary to rationalize his own hatred. Perhaps the most common rationalization is the view that the people in the out-group are what they are because they are ‘born that way’. This explanation is comforting and convincing because it sounds so reasonable to the ethnocentric individual. The rationalization is also dangerous, of course, for on the flimsy ground of hereditary differences he can justify his concern for the out-group’s welfare, and in the extreme cases for destroying altogether. A supreme example of this attitude in action was the Nazis in Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

The ethnocentric’s attitude toward members of the out-group is also a personality variable, a characteristic of the ethnocentric individual. Thus, hi view of anyone different from himself, such as a Negro or a Jew, it is not based entirely – if at all- on his unpleasant experience with the members of the out-group, such as that a certain Negro is physically unclean, or that a Jew shortchanged him, but on the manner in which he internalizes the experience psychology – that is, on the manner in which he perceives the Negro or the Jew. A non-ethnocentric may have unpleasant experiences with a representative of a out-group, but he interprets his experience as an individual one. He thus may dislike the specific person with whom his relations have been unpleasant, but he will not judge the entire group to which the person belongs by the unpleasant person whom he has met. He does not, like the ethnocentric individual, rationalize hi feelings of alienation or enmity or as a threat by the other person, and his dislike for the representative is not transformed into hostility for the entire group.

Many explanations have been offered to account for rejection of and hostility toward out-group members. The frustration aggression hypothesis probably accounts for many forms of ethnocentrism. According to this view, chronic frustration of strong needs leads to unresolved tension, which can be relieved only through aggressive behavior toward other people. Since the person normally does not take his aggressions out indiscriminately against anyone., the most easily rationalized and justified aggressions. Are those, which are directed at persons who have little or no recourse to retaliation or defense? Such targets of aggression are usually members of out-groups, particularly defenseless minority groups.

Excessive conformity is another source of ethnic attitudes. We have indicated that the ethnocentric person places all people who differ from himself into an out-group, which is invariably seen as an actual, or potential threat to the ethnocentric’s way of life. Accordingly, anyone who deviates from the established order, any unconventional or nonconformist individual, is disliked and rejected an placed in the threatening out-group. Even more: many conformists are in the constant fear that their in-group will reject them unless they have the same prejudice as their fellow members. Thus they will make a show of hating Negros, Jews, and foreigners to forestall any suspicion that they have any sympathy for the members of the out-groups.

Personal insecurity is another determinant of ethnocentrism. One source of individual security lies in conformity. Studies show that many submissive and insecure persons attain a measure of self-assurance by belittling and despising other, especially those who are known to belong to minority groups. In the eyes of the insecure person, individuals of minority groups must be inferior, so that by contrast he can feel superior and therefore secure, however intermittently.

An important determinant of ethnocentric attitudes is the personality structure of the individual. There are three ‘types’ of personality, which readily develop ethnocentric attitudes – the sadistic, and the authoritarian.

The sadistic individual is characterized by the possession of intense, ‘free-floating’ angers and aggressions –angers and aggressions whose source does the individual not understand, and whose target is not clear and specific. The individual is free to direct these free-floating angers at anyone whom he considers weaker than himself. Those who are weaker than him are usually out-group members, more particularly minority group members. Since these cannot readily defend themselves against the criticism and rejection by the dominant group, they are easy targets for the sadistic individual. His free-floating hatreds, his sadistic feelings, can be directed toward a specific group, the out-groups of weak and despised individuals.

The authoritarian personality is characterized by rigid mental habits, intolerance of differences, a strong need for domination and power over others, and a contempt for common human weaknesses. These serve as a fertile ground for the development of hatred for any group with little or no status in the community. There is a great deal of research evidence to show that most authoritarian personalities have many prejudices. Because of their lower esteem for the ‘weak’ they are ready to attack physically and verbally anyone in a disadvantageous position.

No discussion of attitudes is complete without a consideration o the nature of public opinion and its relation to attitudes. While most literate people have some idea of what public opinion is, they have no clear idea of its social-psychological character. Public opinion is, of course, as old as organized society, but as a subject of scientific inquiry it is relatively new.

An opinion can be described as public only when there is a consensus of judgments arrived at through some kind of communication. Public opinion is a group phenomenon, a crystallization of attitudes regarding an issue by members of a political body, a class, an economic bloc, or some other grouping of people. It thus represents a stand or position on an issue taken by a number of persons. Of the social traits so far discussed, opinions are the least enduring.

Public opinion is influenced by social psychological forces and by interest groups. Among the social-psychological factors are such forces as stereotypes, deep-seated human experiences, the cultural background of the opinion leaders, the personality structures of the interacting individuals, and the dominant social myths and preconceptions of the group.

Interest groups manipulate and influence the public. There are numerous such groups in American society: Public relation experts, propagandists, the press, the government, reformers and radicals, and analysts of the current social science. In one way or another, these groups aim to create, change, or redirect the attitudes of people toward what seem to the interest group to be important social issues.

Attitudes and opinions, while related, are yet different. An attitude is a tendency or disposition of an individual toward something: a person, a value, or a situation. When an attitude is shared or expressed with other members of a group and is assimilated by most of them, it becomes an opinion. No opinion exists in isolation, but only interaction. An attitude, while formed and expressed in interaction, is fundamentally an individual disposition, whereas an opinion is usually the crystallization or consensus of the dominant attitudes of individuals conceived as a group.

The stress on consensus in our description of public opinion must not be construed to mean that public opinion is a unanimous, or even a majority, opinion. It is best described by means of the statistical concept of central tendency. This tendency is generated by the interaction or competition of individual attitudes. This way of explaining public opinion highlights the conflicts and controversy between the various groups that constitute a public. A public is a number of people who, while spatially widely separated, nonetheless interact with one another through various media of communication. A public is, however, an abstraction, not a concrete reality. It may be thought of as a unity established through the interaction of emotions, ideas, and thoughts. So conceived public opinion, though moving toward consensus is seldom, if ever, unanimous, for there are always dissident groups who do not agree with the majority. This way of conceiving it also reveals the fact that public opinion, lying in the arena of conflict and controversy, is invariably a blend of strong passions and rational discussion.

SENTIMENTS

Many attitudes have properties, which they share with other personality attributes, notably sentiments. The term sentiment designates an attitude, which holds a place of central importance to the individual. Sentiments differ fro attitudes in being much more complex. They correspond on the psychological level to needs like hunger or sex on the physical level. They differ form these physical needs in that they arise in social interaction; they are learned rather than innate. Unlike attitudes, which are subject to change despite their relatively enduring quality, sentiments are powerful foci of concern for the individual, and may last for a lifetime. The devotion of an artist to his craft of a lover to his beloved are good examples. For each hi respective need is unquenchable, and so each pursues hi interest, not only because it is a goal to be attained, but also because it is need that requires satisfaction. For each, practically every event is related to the central need, the dominant sentiment in his life.

Sentiments are the most complex psychological structures short of the total personality. Like motives they resemble needs in many ways; and like values they add intensity to man’s purposes and strivings. Because of they’re emotional and need character they are powerful energizers of behavior. They invest a goal with extraordinary importance and give to many of our acts and aspirations a sense of vital commitment. Many of the dominant sentiments seem to have no terminus; unlike some needs and goals, they can never be fully satisfied. Thus, a person may devote most of his life to one or two great commitments: family, nation, art, and science. Other wishes or needs are subordinated to the cardinal commitment. The dominant sentiment is the basic quality of the shelf, the center of self-identification, and attitudes derive much of their meaning from it. A person’s life theme is sustained by the dominant sentiment. If men may be said to be ‘possessed’, they are possessed in the sense of a total commitment to a value or ideal. Such men are moved by what philosophers, especially the 19th century German Romanticists, called the ‘daemonic age’. Sentiments are significant determinants of the total personality and of the crucial differences between one individual and another.

A sentiment is like an attitude in that it is a pattern of cognitive, motivational, and perceptual characteristics. It differs form an attitude by the presence of a strong affective or emotional component. Its ‘daemonic’ hold on the individual lies in its emotional power. Accordingly, a sentiment may be defined as an early enduring structure of attitudes, which is energized by strong emotional components and directed towards an individually vital goal. Anger is a short-lived emotion, a condition of visceral disequilibria; anger transformed into a sense of righteousness or justice is a sentiment, or a relatively enduring disposition to respond in a certain way toward an object or situation.

The sentiment of self –esteem

A sentiment never exists by itself but is associated with attitudes and other traits. The integrating sentiment in all normal people is the sentiment of self-regard or self esteem. This sentiment gives rise to the manner in which an individual responds to the image held of him by others. Self-esteem is present in the personality make of every healthy individual. It is acquired in interaction with others, and is thus a learned aspect of our total behaviour. In his contact with others from early childhood on, every individual forms relatively enduring image of himself and of the effect of his image upon others. This enduring image composed of structure of attitudes toward him, is the sentiment of self-esteem, also called the self-attitude.

Soloman Asch has called attention to a very important attribute of the self-regarding sentiment. A sentiment extends beyond itself to include all those value systems, which are important to the individual family, nation, profession, friends, and so on. Whatever the person values as being part of him will be loved, protected and defended for in these attitudes the person is in effect defending him.

One of the most important sentiments is the moral sentiment. Unfortunately, psychologists have largely neglected the study of moral behavior. Moral character, psychologically conceived, is the organisation of moral sentiments. While it arises in interaction with others and the traditions of the society, it also derives from an individual’s total personality. So conceived, the moral sentiment is the image of oneself as an ethical being, an image which grows out of the individual’s attitude towards himself. Thus, he avoids wrongdoing not merely because there are social rules, an image of himself as a moral person, and he has a strong sense of loyalty to this image. This set of attitudes is the moral sentiment, the organisation of which is the moral character.

Mature character is much less the product of fear of punishment - for by the time we reach adulthood we have outgrown this fear – than it is the result of the subordination by the self of all those attitudes and sentiments which are inconsistent with the sentiment of self-esteem. Out side factors play a progressively smaller role, and character thus proceeds from the system of sentiments, particularly the moral sentiment and the sentiment of self-esteem.

Pleasantness and Unpleasantness:

Most stimuli affect us at the moment as being either pleasant or unpleasant agreeable or disagreeable. Rarely are we completely indifferent to a stimulus if we give our attention to it. We can think of stimuli as being arranged along a straight line that extends from the most unpleasant at one extreme to the most pleasant at the other. Since the two ends of the scale represent diametrically opposite feelings and attitudes, we are justified in placing them in a straight line. To mildly pleasant stimuli we acquiesce. Strongly pleasant stimuli we move toward or seek after. Mildly unpleasant stimuli cause us to withdraw or to shun them. Strongly unpleasant ones we reject vigorously.

Introspectively, there may or may not be feelings of pleasure or displeasure. One can say of certain color, “I like it,” without at the moment experiencing any noticeable pleasure; or one can say of an odor, “ I dislike it,” without at the moment experiencing displeasure. Such verbal re actions are called “ judgments” While they may reflect a long series of previous experiences, with those particular stimuli and with similar ones. We have no yardsticks with which to measure the strength of feelings, as such. But we can use judgment as our basis for measurement, as we shall soon see.

Affective Value. Since stimuli can be more or less pleasant, and also more or less unpleasant. We have a quantitative scale in the line that extends from pleasantness to unpleasantness. The position of any stimulus on that line is called its affective value. There are methods by which we can assign numerical values to stimuli to denote their positions on this scale. These methods all depend upon choices or judgments of individuals.

Methods of measuring Affective Value

The three most common methods of evaluating stimuli are as follows;

I. Ratings. In this method, human judgments are usually given in terms of numbers. A typical scale defines the numbers something like this.

10 Most pleasant imaginable

9 Greatest possible pleasantness

8 Extremely pleasant

7 Moderately pleasant

6 Mildly pleasant

5 Indifferent

4 Mildly unpleasant

3 Moderately unpleasant

2 Extremely unpleasant

1 Greatest possible unpleasantness

0 Most unpleasant imaginable

The most value to be assigned to a stimulus is the average of the ratings assigned to it by a number of similar, competent judges. Individuals will not all necessarily agree upon same value nor will the same individual give the same identical rating at different times. But the judgments will usually cluster about a mid-value, which can be taken as the typical affective value for that particular group of judges. Results given by one group are very close to those given by a group of similar individuals.

II. Pair comparisons: If you wish to assume that your judges can give judgments of this kind, you may resort to another method. It is easier for the average person to say that one stimulus is preferred to another than it is to give both absolute values on an arbitrary scale. So we may pair each stimulus in our set with every other one, and ask a large number of judges to say which one of the pair they prefer. We can find the percentage of the judges who prefer stimulus A to stimulus B, also stimulus A to C, and B to C, and so on.

III. Rank Order: The method of pair comparisons is often a long and tedious process. A much shorter and often just as effective method id to ask each judge to place the stimuli in rank order of high preference, placing the best-liked one at the top and the most-disliked one at the bottom. Form the combined rankings of a number of judges we can compute scale values much as we do form judgments by pair comparisons.

Factors determining Affective Value

The reasons for linking and disliking stimuli are numerous. It is likely that certain colors, tastes, and odors are preferred because of inborn nervous dispositions. Pleasantness and unpleasantness have always been useful though not infallible guides as to which stimuli should be sought after and which ones would be rejected. In the long run stimuli are normally pleasant to us have been beneficial to life, and stimuli normally unpleasant have been dangerous. Exception is a sweet substance, which promise quick and easy supplies of energy; but alcohol and opium are also sweet.

Before we can state which colors are liked best and which ones least, we must remember that there are many aspects to colors. There are also fashions in colors. One color will grow in popularity for a time, and then give way to another. We like houses in some colors, but not in the same colors as we like gowns or shoes or hats. The first important question is whether there is any common denominator in our preferences for colors when use is not a consideration.

Most of the experimental studies have used rather small numbers of colored paper as stimuli. Interest has usually centered in the more common, wee saturated colors such as orange, red, yellow, green, blue, violet and purple, and in black and white. The results have shown rather general agreement that red, green and blue (in increasing order of preference) are preferred to the other colors mentioned.

But even with colored papers as stimuli, we need to consider several aspects of a color. Colors differ with respect to hue, tint, and chroma. The scientific problem is to determine whether there is any systematic relationship between affective value and each of the three variables of color.

Affective values of odor:

In terms of the primary odors, we may say that the four primaries, flowery, fruity, resinous, and spicy, are pleasant odors, and so are odors that resemble these four strongly. The other two primaries, putrid and scorched, and their derivatives, are generally unpleasant. The biological usefulness of this arrangement is obvious. The first four primaries promise beneficial foods, the last two, on the whole, warn of unhealthful objects.

Tests show that odors disgusting to adults do not affect children the same way until the age of 5. By the age of 7 or 8 the normal rejecting responses appear. Other tests show that odor stimuli so weak that they are not noticed may cause aversions. Students went from house to house with four identical new pairs of ladies hose, one pair of which had been treated to overcome the mildly rancid odor left in hose at the factory. Housewives generally judged the treated pair to be of better quality than the others although odor as such was not noticeable.

Affective values of taste:

Most animals have a “sweet tooth” even goldfish. Salt is pleasant in moderate quantities when desired. Sour and bitter are almost always unpleasant, although at the right intensities and in the right places they also are desired. It all depends upon the intensity of the stimulus and the mood or desire of individual. When satiated with sweets even candy is likely to become repugnant for a time.

Affective values of sounds:

In considering the relation of affective value to simple sounds, we need to keep in mind the two most important was in which sounds differ. They differ in pitch in loudness. Young has found that in general, high pitched and loud tones are usually unpleasant while low pitched and soft tones are usually pleasant.

In general, musical tones are preferred to noises, although children often enjoy noises more. The combinations of two musical tones at a time in musical intervals give varying effects. The combinations of sounds into patterns of speech music carry us over into the field of esthetics, which is to be discussed in later pages.

Learned likes and dislikes.

The likes and dislikes discussed up to this point depend very much upon innate factors. A multitude of human likes and dislikes are undoubtedly learned, even for simple stimuli like colors and tastes. A certain young woman dislikes reddish brown decidedly. She has forgotten that as a child she felt from swing and became panic stricken at the sight of blood that spurted from a wound on her head. Children have been trained to like colors that were presented simultaneously with toys or cookies. Music played while poor children were eating free meals became highly pleasant, though formerly it was disliked. Make any stimulus seem an integral part of the process of gratifying a motive, and it is likely to become pleasant. Make any stimulus an integral part of the process of thwarting a motive or of raising a tension, and it becomes unpleasant. These are the fundamental laws of learning likes and dislikes.

The affective reaction to a stimulus depends to some extent upon the presence of other stimuli and their affective values. Ask an individual to rate a set of odor stimuli. Then impose upon him a set of very unpleasant odors, and then repeat the first experiment. His ratings of the original set of odors now go higher. The reverse change in rating occurs after he experiences a set of very pleasant odors. Thus we see that ratings of affective value are not made independently. They are made on the background of many previous ratings. The influence of the other stimuli upon the present one will depend upon how recently they were applied and how similar they are to the present one.

So far as effective state is concerned, the happiness of an individual seems very dependent upon his level of feeling adaptation. The soldier who has lost both his leg in battle says he feels very lucky to be alive. The young man who has never served in the armed forces is very irritated and depressed because he cannot buy a new model car on account of war restrictions their adaptation levels of feeling are very different.

The law of affective combination

When two stimuli are combined, that is two colors, or a color combined with a form the affective value of the combination bears a definite relation to the affective values of two components. Two pleasant stimuli usually combine to give something more pleasant than either taken alone. And two unpleasant stimuli combine to give something more unpleasant than either one alone. The summation is not complete, for there is some loss in affective value. The combination of pleasant with an unpleasant stimulus usually yields some cancellation, the result lies somewhere between the two when taken alone. When two or more stimuli give a complex experience in which the identities of the parts are wholly or almost wholly lost, the values of the single stimuli may be very much observed. A musical chord is an example of this.

Annoyance:

Annoyances represent aversions that are more than unpleasant; they have at least a trace of anger. Cason has collected numerous specimens of annoyance as given to him by 659 individuals. A few examples are,

1. To hear a person chewing gum loudly.

2. To see a person’s nose running.

3. A person bragging about himself.

4. An effeminate man.

With more complex stimuli, when sensory organization is demanded the appreciation of the object is something more than mere pleasantness. It is esthetic experience. Beauty is a property of some perceived objects and not of others. It is something like a meaning though not a meaning that leads to that leads to use or to knowledge about the object. The best example is seen in music.

Beauty in music:

Music is a complex pattern of sounds that conveys no knowledge or meaning in the ordinary sense of the word. Even so called descriptive music brings to the listener little or no information. Music intended to express farewell or early morning will leave no such ideas unless the listeners are given some broad hints to that effect. Music seems to be enjoyed merely because it brings to the listener an organized pattern, but a pattern having certain properties. Music that we cannot organize we do not like. Of all the aspects of music---melody, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint---melody is the chief determiner of appreciation., then come rhythm and harmony. Repeated hearing of music of the masters that a first is too complex for us eventually leads to better organization and hence enjoyment.

Very much the same holds for compositions of line and color. Arrangements that give balanced, symmetrical, and familiar forms within our powers of organization are more appreciated. According to Ogden preferred forms in art are patterns that conform to the principles of our own nature. For example we bare in general bilaterally symmetrical, so we prefer symmetry. Our own movements are inclined to be rhythmical and we are inclined to organize sensory material into equal, comprehensible units, so we appreciate rhythm. We experience difficulty in resisting the forces of gravity, so we glory in the gracefully poised figure.

The fact that children prefer to look at pictures drawn by other children, rather than at the work of adult artist, indicates that ease of organization has much to do with esthetic effect. The fact that adults prefer adult productions, however, shows that compositions too easily organized are also lacking in esthetic appeal. The truth probably is that the most appreciated objects of art are those neither too easy nor too difficult to unity.

They must contain possibilities of our creating from them mental structures that are still sufficiently new. Novelty is undoubtedly a factor, and so is mastery, if one wishes to bring in the fundamental motives.

Empathy:

Much of our appreciation of the beautiful or the ugly is said to depend upon the process of empathy. This means the identification if ourselves with objects. We “feel ourselves in to them” as if we temporarily put ourselves in their places. For example, one could scarcely gaze at the leaning tower of PISA without feeling some degree of discomfort. If we were the leaning tower, we should be filled with disagreeable muscular strains. While looking at the tower we may actually have minute muscular contractions of the kind that we would have if we were in the tower’s place. For the same reason, when we see a frail-looking column supporting apparently too much weight we also feel uncomfortable, and when we see a too massive column supporting apparently a trivial amount of weight we feel the wasted effort.

Empathy can also afford the explanation of agreeable esthetic experiences. Balanced and well-proportioned objects “look” comfortable and poised. Towering mountains and skyscrapers, awe-inspiring storms and massive machinery, all give normal esthetic thrill, probably because as we feel ourselves into them we share their superior power. Grandeur appeals to our motive of ascendance when we identify ourselves with the large and the powerful, and to our motive of submission when we respect greater power in other persons and things, as we have learned to do. Thus, while empathy seems undoubtedly to be a factor in many esthetic responses, it is probably not a factor in all cases, for in submitting to another power we are not identifying ourselves with it.

Tests of artistic appreciation

There are many factors that tend to make us like or dislike a work of art. Some individuals are more sensitive to these factors than others. There are now psychological tests intended to measure the sensitivity of people to esthetic objects. Fig. 8.3 illustrates material from one of them, the Meier-Seashore Art Judgment test.

When an organism discovers that certain objects and responses lead to the satisfaction of motives, it shows interests in those objects or responses. This is shown by its going toward the objects, or looking at them, and by its indulging in those responses in preference to other activities. Interests are inclination to attend to or to seek certain stimuli or to indulge in certain activities. In human organisms, interests are very numerous and sometimes seemingly very complex.

Measuring Vocational Interests. As an example, let us consider vocational interests. It is obviously true that one person finds some occupations much to his liking, whereas he finds others without appeal or even repelling in what they have to effect him. Whether or not an individual likes his works is a very important consideration. Much thought and work have been given I n recent year to the task of discovering vocational interests in young people.

Let us take as an example the best-known Vocational Interest Blank, devised by Strong. It contains in verbal form some four hundred items to most of which the person is to respond by saying that he likes, dislikes, or is indifferent to the thing suggested. A section on amusements, for example is arranged as follows, the individual encircling L, I, or D according as he likes, is indifferent to, or dislikes each particular item:

A list of general activities is to be judged in the same manner:

A list of general activities is to be judged in the same manner:

School subjects are also to be rated:

Still other items include the names of people admired most, special activities liked or disliked, and personal characteristics.

It has been found, by studying the reactions to all the items, given by hundreds of men and women in different occupations, just which likes and dislikes are characteristic of people who contentedly engaged in each occupation. By statistical methods, it is possible to score an individual’s reactions for his probable degree of interest in some forty occupations for men, and some twenty-one occupations for women. The results are not always infallible, and the choice of occupation should never be made on the basis of score taken by itself. Many other factors cause failure in an occupation, and various circumstances other than interests must be considered in the choice of a vacation.

Conclusion

While the disagreements in the area of attitudes, values, sentiments, and public opinion loom large, there is an increasing core of agreement among competent psychologists regarding their social and psychological origin, their nature, and their development. This agreement concerns the belief that attitudes are predispositions to action, values are the objects toward which the predispositions are directed, opinions are crystallizations of attitudes and sentiments are enduring personal commitments. Attitudes and values change in relation to each other, and are relatively enduring.

References:

· Guilford, General Psychology (1952) pg. 198-217

· Garrett, General Psychology (1970) pg. 572-588

· Morgan and King, Introduction to Psychology (1966) pg. 594-631