The study of attitudes has helped us to further our insight into understanding human behaviour. Models such as the Tripartite model and the Theory of Planned Behaviour provide a structure to how our attitudes influence our behaviour. Attitude is defined as a general feeling of evaluation towards an object/person, positive or negative (Hogg, 2013).
The Tripartite Model of Attitudes proposed by Rosenberg and Hovland provides a structure to how our attitudes towards something affect our behaviour. They believe that our attitudes are broken up into Affective, Behavioural and Cognitions. Affective is your feelings towards an object (e.g. ‘I hate marmite’). Behavioural is the way you will act or your intentions towards something (e.g. ‘If I
…show more content…
This explores how attitudes can predict deliberative behaviour and proposes the idea that intentions are the best way to predict planned behaviour (Akert et al, 2014). Intention to perform a behaviour comes from your attitudes towards the behaviour, other people’s attitudes towards it (social norms or perceived social pressure from family/friends) and your perceived behavioural control (the extent you believe you can perform the behaviour). If your attitude towards a certain behaviour is positive and it is also a social norm to perform this behaviour then you will be more motivated to do it. An example of this is smoking, if your attitude towards smoking is positive and the perceived social pressure from your friends is that it is ‘cool’, then your intentions will be to smoke. A criticism of TPB is that its effectiveness is subjective to how specific the attitudes are (Akert et al, 2010). Davidson and Jaccard asked a group of married women about their attitudes towards using birth control, then two years later asked them if they used birth control and studied the correlation. They found that the more specific the experimenters were when asking the women, the stronger the correlation was between their attitudes and behavior. Women who were asked their “attitude towards birth control” only had a 0.8 correlation of their attitudes and behaviour. Women who were asked “Attitude towards using birth control pills during the next two years” showed a 0.57 attitude/behaviour correlation (Davidson and Jaccard, 1979). This study concludes that despite TPB being an accurate model in determining behaviour, it is most accurate when there is specific detail of the attitude in