According to psychologists, attitude is very important in the development of the behaviors of people (Bohner " Wanke, 2014). The psychologists define attitude as a tendency to examine things in particular ways. Attitude is learned and can include the examination of objects, different people, issues or occurrences, and events. The evaluations that make up attitude are usually either positive or negative and can be unsure at times leading to mixed feelings in some cases. Attitude is composed of three aspects that are also termed as the ABC’s of attitude (Bohner " Wanke, 2014). The ABC’s include the cognitive component, affective component and finally the behavioral component. The cognitive aspect concerns the beliefs as well as the thoughts of the person about the subject matter. The affective aspect concerns how the issue or thing makes one feel and the behavioral aspect is how the person behaves as a result in the development of the attitude attitude (Bohner " Wanke, 2014).
The operant conditioning theory can help understand how the development of an attitude can contribute to a particular behavior change in response. According to the theory, negative feedback or response from the society concerning particular behavior or issue causes people to develop negative opinions about the issue (Petty, 2018). For example, when people chastise a person, complain or avoid the person when he or she lights a cigarette in their vicinity, the person may develop some negative attitude concerning smoking in public or smoking as a behavior leading them to stop smoking in public. However, when someone receives positive feedback and praise or gifts for a behavior, the person develops positive opinions about the behavior and therefore continues it if he or she was doing it or starts doing it. Therefore, attitude is very important for the development of behavior.
Cognitive dissonance, on the other hand, is a concept that explains the changes that happen in the attitudes of people to align with their behaviors. The concept can be used to explain the changes that happen in the behaviors of people as a result of legislation despite the fact that morality cannot be legislated (Guazzini, Yoneki " Gronchi, 2015). Cognitive dissonance causes people whose attitudes contradict their behaviors to feel psychological distress and therefore seek to change their attitudes to be in line with their beliefs and behaviors. For example, before the civil right laws were passed, some people did not have problems with mistreating people in the United States of America. People offered racist remarks in public and made other feel little before them. However, after the laws passed, many people changed their behaviors to suit the new laws. The behavior changes resulted from cognitive dissonance as the idea that it was not moral to mistreat others caused distress among the people. Therefore, they had to change their attitudes to be in accordance with what they knew from the laws and hence learn new and positive attitudes towards each other despite their races. The theory of operant conditioning shows how the cognitive dissonance comes when the attitude changes due to the negative results of mistreating other people (Kaufman, Flanagan " Seidman, 2015). Cognitive dissonance theory, on the other hand, explains the change in the behaviors of people whose attitudes contradicted with their knowledge concerning the immorality of mistreating other people.
In conclusion, attitude and behavior are interconnected. Even though attitude can change the behaviors of people, the behaviors can also cause changes in attitude. People change their behavior to suit their attitudes concerning particular issues while those who are forced to behave by law consequently change their attitudes due to cognitive dissonance.
References
Bohner, G., " Wanke, M. (2014). Attitudes and attitude change. Psychology Press.
Guazzini, A., Yoneki, E., " Gronchi, G. (2015). Cognitive dissonance and social influence effects on preference judgments: An eye-tracking based system for their automatic assessment. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 73, 12-18.
Kaufman, G. F., Flanagan, M., " Seidman, M. (2015). Creating Stealth Game Interventions for Attitude and Behavior Change: An" Embedded Design" Model. In DiGRA Conference.
Petty, R. E. (2018). Attitudes and persuasion: Classic and contemporary approaches. Routledge.
