- What an attitude actually is, and how it differs from a mere opinion, a belief, or a value
- The three components every attitude has (A-B-C), and the four properties that describe it (valence, extremeness, complexity, centrality)
- How attitudes are formed: the five learning mechanisms and four contextual factors behind them
- How attitudes change: Heider’s balance concept, Festinger’s cognitive dissonance, and Mohsin’s two-step concept, and the four factors that decide whether a change actually happens
- Why attitude and behaviour do not always match, with LaPiere’s study as the book’s example
- What prejudice and discrimination are, where prejudice comes from, and the real strategies psychologists use to reduce it
CBSE’s 2026-27 Psychology paper (Code 037) carries 70 marks of theory across 7 chapters and 30 marks of Practical work (a practical file and case profile; five psychological tests that you administer and interpret during the year; in the practical exam you administer and interpret two tests; plus a viva voce, an oral exam where you are asked questions face to face). Chapter 6 (Unit VI, Attitude and Social Cognition) carries 8 theory marks. These notes cover the theory portion in full: ask your teacher about the Practical file requirements separately.
This chapter is titled “Attitude and Social Cognition,” but the CBSE 2026-27 curriculum lists only these topics for Unit VI: Introduction, Explaining Social Behaviour, Nature and Components of Attitudes, Attitude Formation and Change (with the Attitude-Behaviour Relationship), Prejudice and Discrimination, and Strategies for Handling Prejudice. The 2026-27 reprint prints no separate sections on social cognition, schemas, impression formation, attribution or pro-social behaviour, so you do not need to look for them. The idea of a stereotype still appears inside Prejudice and Discrimination (Section 6), which is in the syllabus. Everything below this line is fully in your syllabus.
1What Is an Attitude?
Social psychology studies how a person’s behaviour is affected by other people and by the social environment around them: you met this idea in Class XI as behaviour that happens when others are actually present, imagined to be present, or simply assumed to be present without being seen (implied presence). All of us form attitudes: ways of thinking about specific topics and people.
Try this: think about how many times today you said, silently or aloud, “In my opinion…” or “Others may say so and so, but I feel…” What you filled in the blank is an opinion. Now ask: how important is that opinion to you? Some opinions are only mildly important, and you don’t care much whether others agree. Others matter so much that if someone challenges them, you get emotional. When your views are not merely thoughts but also have emotional and action components, they are more than opinions: they are attitudes.
An attitude is a state of mind: a set of views or thoughts about some topic (called the attitude object) that carries an evaluative feature (positive, negative, or neutral), is accompanied by an emotional component, and includes a tendency to act in a particular way towards that object.
Attitudes are themselves not behaviour, but they represent a tendency to behave or act in certain ways. They are part of cognition, along with an emotional component, and cannot be observed from outside. Attitudes also serve a real purpose: they give a person a background or “blueprint” that makes it easier to decide how to act in a new situation, for example, your attitude towards foreigners in general shapes how you behave the first time you actually meet one.
2Nature and Components of Attitudes
Every attitude is made of three parts, referred to together as its A-B-C components:
Affective
The emotional component: how you feel about the attitude object.
Behavioural
The conative component: your tendency to act in a particular way towards it.
Cognitive
The thought component: what you believe or think about it.
Suppose people in your neighbourhood start a tree-plantation campaign. Your positive view about a “green environment,” based on sufficient information, is the cognitive (C) component. Feeling happy seeing greenery and sad or angry seeing trees cut down is the affective (A) component. Actually joining the plantation drive is the behavioural (B) component. We usually expect all three to point the same way, but they need not: your cognitive component could be very strong while your affective and behavioural components stay only weakly positive, and “predicting” one component from the other two will not always give the correct picture.
2.1 Attitudes vs. beliefs vs. values
Belief
- The cognitive component of an attitude
- The ground on which an attitude stands
- E.g. belief in God, belief in democracy
Value
- An attitude/belief with a “should” or “ought” aspect
- E.g. “one should always be honest”
- Becomes an inseparable part of a person’s outlook, so values are hard to change
2.2 Four properties of an attitude
Take an attitude towards nuclear research, rated on this 5-point scale: 1 = Very bad, 2 = Bad, 3 = Neutral, 4 = Good, 5 = Very good. Four properties describe any attitude:
| Property | What it means | On the nuclear-research scale |
|---|---|---|
| Valence | Whether the attitude is positive, negative, or neutral | Rating 4-5 = positive; 1-2 = negative; 3 = neutral |
| Extremeness | How far the attitude is from neutral | Rating 1 is as extreme as rating 5, just opposite in direction; 2 and 4 are less extreme |
| Simplicity / Complexity (also called multiplexity) |
How many smaller “member” attitudes bundle together to make up one broader attitude | Attitude to health = many member attitudes = complex; attitude to one person = mainly one attitude = simple |
| Centrality | How much this attitude influences other attitudes in the system | A negative attitude to high military expenditure can be a central, influential attitude within one’s broader attitude to world peace |
Each “member” attitude inside a complex attitude system also has its own full set of A-B-C components. Do not confuse the two ideas: A-B-C is what every single attitude is made of, while simplicity/complexity (multiplexity) is about how many such attitudes are bundled together.
3How Attitudes Are Formed
Attitudes are mostly learned, through personal experience and through interaction with others. A few studies show some sort of inborn aspect of attitudes, but such genetic factors work only indirectly, alongside learning, so most social psychologists focus on the conditions under which attitudes are learned.
3.1 Five ways attitudes are learned
By association
A student likes a teacher, so the positive qualities of the teacher get linked to the subject taught, and the student ends up liking the subject too.
By reward or punishment
A teenager praised as “Miss Good Health” for doing yogasanas may develop a positive attitude to yoga; a child who keeps falling ill from junk food is likely to develop a negative attitude to it.
By modelling
Children who observe their parents respecting elders, and being appreciated for it, may form a respectful attitude towards elders themselves.
Through group/cultural norms
Unwritten rules of a group or culture (e.g. offering money, sweets or flowers at a place of worship) become attitudes over time, often a mix of all three mechanisms above.
Through exposure to information
Attitudes can form even without others physically present, purely from information received through media. For example, reading the biography of a self-actualised person can build a positive attitude towards hard work as a means to success.
3.2 Four factors that provide the context for learning attitudes
| Factor | How it works |
|---|---|
| Family and school environment | Parents and family shape attitudes in the early years; school becomes important later. Learning here happens by association, reward/punishment, and modelling. |
| Reference groups | Tell an individual the accepted norms of thinking and behaviour; especially powerful at the start of adolescence, when belonging to a group matters most. |
| Personal experiences | Direct experience, not routed through family or a group, can cause a drastic attitude change. For example: an army driver who narrowly survived a mission that killed all his companions gave up his job, returned to his native village in Maharashtra, and became an active community leader: a strong positive attitude towards community upliftment formed purely from that one experience. |
| Media-related influences | Audio-visual media, the Internet, and school textbooks first strengthen the cognitive and affective components, and may later affect behaviour too. Nobody controls in advance which attitudes the media will create or which direction they will take, so media can end up creating consumerist attitudes (an exaggerated desire to keep buying and consuming things) where none existed before; the same media can also be used positively, to promote social harmony. |
4How Attitudes Change
Attitudes that are still forming, and are more opinion-like, are much more likely to change than attitudes that have become firmly established and have become part of a person’s values. Changing people’s attitudes matters practically to community leaders, politicians, producers, and advertisers, which is why psychologists have studied the process closely.
4.1 Three concepts behind attitude change
Pictured as a P-O-X triangle: P is the person whose attitude is studied, O is another person, X is the attitude object. An attitude changes when the P-O, O-X, and P-X relationships are imbalanced, because imbalance is logically uncomfortable.
Imbalance exists when all three sides are negative, or when two sides are positive and one is negative. Balance exists when all three sides are positive, or when two sides are negative and one is positive.
The cognitive components of an attitude must be consonant (in logical agreement with each other), not dissonant (clashing with each other). For example, a person may hold two dissonant cognitions at once: Cognition I, “Pan masala causes mouth cancer, which is fatal,” and Cognition II, “I eat pan masala.” Holding both together is uncomfortable, and this discomfort is cognitive dissonance: it forces one cognition to change (here, stopping pan masala) to restore consonance.
After a very boring experiment, students were asked to tell a waiting group it had been “very interesting.” Half were paid $1 for this lie, half were paid $20. Weeks later, the $1 group described the experiment as more interesting than the $20 group did.
Why: the $1 group had dissonant cognitions (“The experiment was very boring” and “I told a lie for only $1.”) and reduced the dissonance by changing them to “The experiment was actually interesting” and “I would not have told a lie for only $1.” The $20 group did not experience dissonance (“I told a lie because I was paid $20.”), so they did not change their attitude and rated the experiment as very boring.
Both balance and cognitive dissonance are examples of cognitive consistency: the different parts of an attitude system must logically line up, or the person feels genuine mental discomfort until something in the system shifts.
Attitude change happens in two steps between a target (the person whose attitude is to change) and a source (the person whose influence brings the change).
Example: Preeti reads that a soft drink she enjoys is extremely harmful, but her favourite sportsperson advertises it, and she has identified with the sportsperson. Suppose the sportsperson wants to change people’s attitude to this drink. The sportsperson must first show positive feelings for her/his fans and then actually change her/his own habit of consuming the drink, perhaps by substituting a health drink (the book labels this Step I). Seeing this, Preeti is very likely to change her own attitude and behaviour and stop the harmful drink (Step II).
4.2 Four factors that decide whether attitudes change
| Factor | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Characteristics of the existing attitude | Positive attitudes change more easily than negative ones; extreme and central attitudes are harder to change than mild, peripheral (less significant) ones; simple attitudes change more easily than complex ones. Change can be congruent (same direction, e.g. positive → more positive) or incongruent (opposite direction). Congruent change is generally easier. |
| Source characteristics | Credibility and attractiveness of the person delivering the message. A computer engineer convinces adult laptop-buyers more than a schoolchild does, but a schoolchild convinces other schoolchildren more than a professional does (Figure 6.1). For products like cars, sales can rise when the message comes not from an expert but from a popular public figure. |
| Message characteristics | Just enough information (not too much, not too little); a rational appeal (e.g. a pressure cooker saves fuel such as LPG and is economical) vs. an emotional appeal (e.g. if one cares for the family, nutrition would be a major concern; Figure 6.2 in the book); which motive the message activates also matters, e.g. an ad for milk can promise it will make you healthy and good-looking, or more energetic and successful at your job, two different motives aimed at the same product. Face-to-face transmission is usually more effective than indirect transmission such as letters, pamphlets or mass media (e.g. a positive attitude to Oral Rehydration Salts, ORS, is created more effectively when community social workers and doctors talk to people directly than by only describing ORS on the radio; Figure 6.3); TV and the Internet come close to face-to-face contact but are still not a full substitute for it. Fear sometimes works well in convincing people, but if a message generates too much fear, it turns off the receiver and has little persuasive effect (frightening pictures of dental cavities may make people less positive about dental care). |
| Target characteristics | Open, flexible people change more easily (advertisers benefit most from them); people with strong prejudices (a negative attitude towards a group, covered in Section 6 below) change less easily; persuasibility (a person’s general tendency to be persuaded) is one of the target qualities that influence the likelihood and extent of change; low self-esteem people change more easily than high self-esteem people; more intelligent people may change their attitudes less easily than those with lower intelligence, although sometimes they change more willingly, because they base their attitude on more information and thinking. |
Cut out an eye-catching advertisement from a newspaper or magazine and note: its topic; its good and bad consequences; whether it uses an emotional or a rational appeal; and whether it uses a popular figure (an expert source or a well-liked person).
5Attitude-Behaviour Relationship
We usually expect behaviour to follow logically from attitude, but an individual’s attitude is not always shown through their behaviour, and their actual behaviour can even contradict their stated attitude. Psychologists have found that attitude and behaviour are consistent when:
- The attitude is strong and holds a central place in the attitude system
- The person is aware of their own attitude
- There is little or no external/group pressure to behave otherwise
- The person’s behaviour is not being watched or evaluated by others
- The person believes the behaviour will have a positive consequence
In an era when Americans were said to be prejudiced against the Chinese, Richard LaPiere sent a Chinese couple travelling across the US to stay in different hotels; only once were they refused service. Sometime later, LaPiere sent questionnaires to managers of hotels and tourist homes in the same areas where the couple had travelled, asking whether they would give accommodation to Chinese guests. A very large percentage said no, a negative attitude, inconsistent with the positive behaviour actually shown to the travelling couple. Thus, attitudes may not always predict actual behaviour.
Sometimes it works the other way: behaviour decides attitude. In Box 6.2, students who got only one dollar for telling others the experiment was interesting concluded from their own behaviour that their attitude to the experiment was positive (“I would not have told a lie for this small amount of money, which means that the experiment was actually interesting”).
6Prejudice and Discrimination
A prejudice is an attitude towards a particular group, usually negative, often based on a stereotype: a cluster of ideas about a specific group’s characteristics, assumed to apply to every member of that group.
Discrimination is the behavioural component of prejudice: behaving in a less positive way towards a target group compared to another group that is favoured.
The cognitive component of prejudice is the stereotype itself; the affective component is dislike or hatred; prejudice may also get translated into discrimination, the behavioural component. An extreme example is the genocide committed by the Nazis in Germany against Jewish people, prejudice escalating into hatred, discrimination, and mass killing.
Prejudice can exist without discrimination
- A negative attitude held privately, never acted on
Discrimination can exist without prejudice
- Unequal treatment without a genuinely held negative attitude behind it
The two very often go together, and wherever they do, conflict between groups is very likely. Indian society has seen discrimination, with and without prejudice, based on gender, religion, community, caste, physical handicap, and illnesses such as AIDS. Law can sometimes curb discriminatory behaviour, but the cognitive and emotional core of prejudice is much harder to change.
6.1 Five sources of prejudice
Two terms used below: your ingroup is the group you yourself belong to; any other group is an outgroup.
Learning
The same mechanisms behind any attitude: association, reward/punishment, modelling, group norms, exposure to information, via family, reference groups, personal experience, and media. People who learn prejudiced attitudes may develop a “prejudiced personality”: low adjusting capacity (difficulty coping with stress or change), anxiety, and hostility towards the outgroup.
Strong social identity & ingroup bias
A very positive attitude towards one’s own group (ingroup) gets boosted by holding negative attitudes towards other groups (outgroups).
Scapegoating
A majority group blames a weak or small minority for its own social, economic, or political problems.
Kernel of truth
People keep a stereotype believing there must be some truth, or ‘kernel of truth’, in what everyone says about the other group. Even a few examples are sufficient to support the ‘kernel of truth’ idea.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
In some cases the target group may behave in ways that justify the prejudice, that is, confirm the negative expectations, and so strengthens it.
7Strategies for Handling Prejudice
Knowing the sources of prejudice is the first step in handling it. Effective strategies aim at four goals:
- Minimising opportunities to learn prejudices
- Changing such attitudes where they already exist
- De-emphasising a narrow social identity based on the ingroup
- Discouraging self-fulfilling-prophecy tendencies among prejudice’s victims
✓ How these goals can be accomplished
- Education and information dissemination (spreading correct information widely): corrects stereotypes about specific groups and tackles strong ingroup bias
- Increasing intergroup contact: allows direct communication, removes mistrust, and lets each group discover the other’s positive qualities
- Highlighting individual identity over group identity: weakens the importance of group (ingroup or outgroup) as the basis for judging a person
✗ When intergroup contact fails
- The two groups meet in a competitive, not cooperative, context
- Interactions stay distant, so the groups never really get to know each other
- The two groups are different in power or status
More on social identity and intergroup conflict is taken up in the next chapter, Social Influence and Group Processes.
- An attitude = attitude object + evaluative feature + emotion + tendency to act; it is not behaviour itself
- A-B-C components: Affective, Behavioural, Cognitive (Box 6.1’s Green Environment example)
- Beliefs are the cognitive ground; values carry “should/ought” and are hard to change
- Four properties: Valence, Extremeness, Simplicity/Complexity, Centrality
- Attitudes form by association, reward/punishment, modelling, group norms, shaped by family/school, reference groups, personal experience, media
- Attitude change: Heider’s balance (P-O-X triangle), Festinger’s cognitive dissonance (Box 6.2, $1 vs $20), Mohsin’s two-step concept
- Change depends on: existing attitude’s traits, source credibility/attractiveness, message content, target’s traits
- Attitude ≠ behaviour always: LaPiere’s Chinese-couple study shows attitudes may not always predict behaviour; sometimes behaviour decides attitude
- Prejudice (attitude) + stereotype (cognitive) + discrimination (behaviour); 5 sources: learning (→ prejudiced personality), ingroup bias, scapegoating, kernel of truth, self-fulfilling prophecy
- Handling prejudice: education, cooperative intergroup contact (only if cooperative, close, and equal-status), highlighting individual identity
- Can I name and explain all three A-B-C components without looking?
- Can I explain Heider’s P-O-X triangle with the dowry example, in my own words?
- Can I explain why the $1 group in Box 6.2 rated the experiment as more interesting than the $20 group?
- Can I list all five conditions for attitude-behaviour consistency?
- Can I name all five sources of prejudice and the three conditions under which intergroup contact actually works?
The full question bank for this chapter (MCQs, assertion-reason, case studies, and 1/2/4/6-mark subjective questions with model answers) is in the separate Important Questions and MCQ/Objective Questions posts for this chapter.