Attitude Meaning in Ethics: Components, Functions, Formation and Change

Attitude Meaning: Definition and Related Terms

Difference Between Attitude, Belief, Value, Opinion and Aptitude

The GS Paper IV syllabus lists the topic in one line: "Attitude: content, structure, function; its influence and relation with thought and behavior; moral and political attitudes; social influence and persuasion."

Four words sit close to attitude, and examiners test the difference. A belief is the cognitive part of an attitude, the ground on which the attitude stands. A value is an attitude or belief with a 'should' or 'ought' in it, such as the idea that one should always be honest. A value forms when a belief or attitude becomes an inseparable part of a person's outlook on life, and that is why values are difficult to change.

An opinion is a view held without strong feeling or action. Aptitude is of a different kind altogether. It is a person's potential for acquiring skills, whereas attitude describes how the person evaluates something.

Structure of Attitude: Components and Properties

Three Components of Attitude: The ABC Model

An attitude has three components. The cognitive component is what the person knows or believes about the object, together with the evaluation. The affective component is the feeling the object arouses. The behavioural component is the tendency to act, and it is also called the conative component. The initials of the three, Affective, Behavioural and Cognitive (ABC), give the model its name.

Take a tree plantation campaign in the neighbourhood as part of a green environment movement. A person with sufficient information about the environment holds a positive view (cognitive). She feels happy to see greenery and sad and angry when trees are cut down (affective). She takes part in the plantation campaign (behavioural). One attitude thus has all three parts.

The three parts are expected to point the same way, but they need not. The cognitive side may be strong while feeling and action are weaker, or thought and feeling may be positive while behaviour stays neutral. For this reason predicting one component from the other two does not always give the correct picture of an attitude.

Four Properties of Attitude: Valence, Extremeness, Complexity, Centrality

Besides its three components, an attitude has four properties. They describe how positive, how strong, how many-sided and how important it is.

• Valence: Whether the attitude is positive, negative or neutral. On a five-point scale about nuclear research, a rating of 4 or 5 is positive, 1 or 2 is negative and 3 is neutral.
• Extremeness: How positive or negative the attitude is. Ratings of 1 and 5 are equally extreme, in opposite directions; ratings of 2 and 4 are less extreme; a neutral attitude is lowest on extremeness.
• Simplicity or complexity: How many attitudes sit inside a broader attitude. An attitude towards health and well-being is a family of member attitudes (physical and mental health, happiness, how to achieve them) and so is complex; an attitude towards one person is usually a single attitude and so simple.
• Centrality: The role of the attitude in the system. A central attitude influences the other attitudes much more than a peripheral one. A negative attitude towards high military expenditure may be central to a person's attitude towards world peace.

The properties decide how easily an attitude changes.

Explicit and Implicit Attitudes

Some attitudes are held consciously and some are not. Explicit attitudes are deliberately formed and easy to report. Implicit attitudes work at an unconscious level, out of awareness, and are measured indirectly. Both explicit and implicit attitudes can shape behaviour.

For a public servant the distinction is practical. A person may sincerely believe in treating everyone equally, yet an attitude learned unconsciously in childhood can colour a quick decision about a complainant. The syllabus asks about attitude and its relation to behaviour, and implicit attitudes are one reason the link is imperfect. Knowing they exist is the first step to checking them.

Functions of Attitude: The Functional Approach

Five Functions of Attitude

The functional approach asks why people hold attitudes at all. Its answer is that attitudes serve psychological needs. The approach goes back to the studies of Daniel Katz in 1960 and of Smith and colleagues in 1956, and the usual list has five functions.

The same object can serve different functions for different people. A high self-monitoring person, who shapes behaviour to fit in with others, often holds attitudes that serve the social-adjustive function; a low self-monitoring person is more responsive to arguments about the intrinsic quality of a thing, which reflects value-expressive concerns.

Why the Function Decides How to Change an Attitude

Knowing the function tells a persuader where to push. An attitude held for utilitarian reasons moves when rewards and punishments change. One held to defend the ego resists facts and needs reassurance rather than argument. A value-expressive attitude changes only when the values themselves are engaged, and a social-adjustive attitude changes when the group's norm changes. A campaign aimed at the wrong function misses its audience. A sanitation drive that offers only health facts struggles in a village where people care most about group approval.

Attitude Formation: How Attitudes Are Learned

Five Processes of Attitude Formation

Attitudes are formed as people interact with others. Some research shows an inborn aspect, but genetic factors influence attitudes only indirectly, along with learning, so attitudes are mostly learned through one's own experiences and through other people. Five processes do the learning.

• Association: Students often like a subject because they like the teacher; the teacher's positive qualities get linked to the subject.
• Reward and punishment: A teenager who does yogasanas regularly and is honoured as 'Miss Good Health' in school develops a positive attitude towards yoga. A child who keeps falling ill from junk food learns a negative attitude towards it and a positive one towards healthy food.
• Modelling: Children form a respectful attitude towards elders by seeing parents show respect and be appreciated for it.
• Group or cultural norms: Norms are unwritten rules about behaviour that everyone is expected to show in specific circumstances, and over time they become attitudes. Offering money, sweets, fruit and flowers in a place of worship is normative in some religions.
• Exposure to information: Reading the biographies of self-actualised persons can build a positive attitude towards hard work.

Factors in Attitude Formation: Family, Reference Groups, Experience and Media

Four settings supply the context in which these processes act.

• Family and school: In the early years parents and family members play a significant role, and later the school becomes an important background. Learning there happens by association, reward and punishment and modelling.
• Reference groups: They indicate to a person the norms of acceptable behaviour and ways of thinking. Attitudes towards political, religious and social groups, occupations and national issues are often developed through them, and the influence is noticeable especially at the beginning of adolescence, when it is important to feel that one belongs to a group.
• Personal experience: Some attitudes come from a direct experience that changes life. An army driver narrowly escaped death when all his companions were killed, left the army, returned to his village in Maharashtra and became a community leader whose efforts changed the face of the village.
• Media: Audio-visual media, the Internet and even school textbooks first strengthen the cognitive and affective components and later may affect the behavioural one. The media make people better informed, but there may be no check on the information, and they can create consumerist attitudes where none existed or be used to create positive attitudes that help social harmony.

These four explain why people in one society hold opposite attitudes to the same issue. Take caste. A person raised in a family and reference group that keeps caste rules learns to treat them as normal; another whose school, friends or personal experience exposes the injustice of caste learns to reject them. Education and exposure to information can loosen attitudes learned early, while group norms and the fear of being left out hold them in place.

Prejudice, Stereotypes and Discrimination

How Prejudice Forms: Stereotype, Dislike and Discrimination

A prejudice is an attitude towards a particular group, usually negative, and often based on a stereotype. A stereotype is a cluster of ideas about the characteristics of a group, assumed to apply to every member. The ABC model fits it exactly. The stereotype is the cognitive component and dislike or hatred the affective one. Discrimination, which means treating one group less favourably than another, is the behavioural component.

Prejudice can exist without discrimination and discrimination without prejudice, yet the two often go together, and wherever they exist conflict between groups in the same society is likely. Discrimination can often be curbed by law, but the thinking and feeling behind prejudice are harder to change.

The Constitution curbs the behaviour directly. Article 15 bars the State from discriminating against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and Article 17 abolishes untouchability and forbids its practice in any form. India has seen discrimination based on gender, religion, community, caste, disability and illnesses such as AIDS, which is why the syllabus's foundational values include tolerance and compassion towards the weaker sections.

Prejudice has several sources.

• Learning: Prejudice is learned like other attitudes, through association, reward and punishment, observing others, group norms and exposure to information that encourages it.
• Strong social identity and ingroup bias: A person with a very positive attitude towards their own group boosts that group's standing by holding negative attitudes to other groups.
• Scapegoating: The majority group blames a minority outgroup, too weak or small to defend itself, for its own social, economic or political problems.
• Kernel of truth: People keep a stereotype because they believe there must be some truth in what everyone says, and a few examples are enough.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: The target group behaves in ways that confirm the negative expectation and so strengthens the prejudice.

Strategies for Handling Prejudice

Knowing the sources is the first step in handling prejudice, and three strategies follow from them.

• Education and information: Correct information breaks stereotypes about specific groups and reduces strong ingroup bias.
• Intergroup contact: Direct communication removes mistrust and lets each side find the positive qualities of the other. It works only when the two groups meet in a cooperative rather than competitive setting, interact closely enough to know each other and are not different in power or status.
• Individual identity over group identity: Judging a person as an individual weakens the group as the basis of judgement.

Attitude Change: Balance, Dissonance and the Two-Step Concept

Three Theories of Attitude Change

Attitudes that are still forming and more like opinions change easily; attitudes that have become part of a person's values resist change. Three ideas explain how change happens.

Balance was proposed by Fritz Heider and is described by the P‑O‑X triangle. P is the person whose attitude is studied, O is another person and X is the attitude object. The triangle is unbalanced when all three sides are negative or when two are positive and one negative; then one attitude must change towards balance, because imbalance is logically uncomfortable. Take dowry. P favours it (P‑X positive); P plans to marry his son to the daughter of O, who opposes dowry (O‑X negative) and who likes P (O‑P positive). Two positives and one negative make an imbalance. P may turn against dowry, O may come to accept it, or O may start disliking P.

Cognitive dissonance was proposed by Leon Festinger and stresses the cognitive component. Two clashing cognitions, such as 'pan masala causes mouth cancer which is fatal' and 'I eat pan masala', make a person feel out of tune, and one of them has to change. The sensible way to reduce the dissonance is to stop eating pan masala. Balance and dissonance are both cases of cognitive consistency, since the mind wants the parts of an attitude to point the same way.

The classic experiment is by Festinger and Carlsmith. Students who had done a boring task were paid either $1 or $20 to tell waiting students that it was interesting. The $1 group later rated the task as more interesting than the $20 group. The $20 group had a good reason for the lie and felt no dissonance; the $1 group did not, so they changed their attitude: 'I would not have told a lie for this small amount, so the experiment must have been interesting.'

The two-step concept was proposed by S. M. Mohsin, an Indian psychologist. In step one the target identifies with the source, having liking and regard for it, and the source must have a positive attitude towards the target. In step two the source itself changes its behaviour towards the attitude object, and the target, observing this, imitates it. For example, a fan who drinks a harmful soft drink gives it up only after her favourite sportsperson first shows regard for fans and then gives up the drink in public.

Factors That Influence Attitude Change

Whether an attitude changes, and how far, depends on six sets of factors.

• The existing attitude: Positive attitudes change more easily than negative; extreme and central attitudes are harder to change than less extreme and peripheral ones; simple attitudes change more easily than complex ones.
• Direction of change: A congruent change moves in the same direction as the existing attitude (a positive attitude becomes more positive); an incongruent change moves the opposite way. Congruent changes are easier.
• Source: Credibility and attractiveness matter. Adults buying a laptop are convinced more by a computer engineer than by a schoolchild, but schoolchildren may trust another schoolchild; for some products, popular public figures sell more than experts.
• Message: The amount of information should be just enough, neither too much nor too little. The appeal may be rational or emotional, and the motives it activates matter. Fear sometimes works, but too much fear turns the receiver off.
• Mode: Face-to-face transmission is usually more effective than letters, pamphlets or mass media. Community social workers and doctors who talk to people directly create a positive attitude to Oral Rehydration Salts better than the radio alone.
• Target: Open and flexible people change more easily; people with strong prejudices change less; people with low self-esteem change more easily than those with high self-esteem.

Social Influence and Persuasion

Kelman's Three Levels: Compliance, Identification, Internalisation

Social influence is the way other people change a person's attitudes and behaviour. Herbert Kelman set out three processes of attitude change in a paper of 1958, to separate public conformity from private acceptance. They differ in how deep the change goes.

Compliance is a change in behaviour, not necessarily in attitude. Identification is what celebrity endorsements use. Internalisation is the deepest, because the person finds the content intrinsically rewarding and consistent with personal values.

Persuasion: The Central and Peripheral Routes

Persuasion is attitude change through communication. The elaboration likelihood model, developed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo in 1986, describes two routes. Under the central route, persuasion results from careful and thoughtful consideration of the merits of the information. Under the peripheral route it results from association with positive or negative cues, or a simple inference about the merits of the position, such as the attractiveness of the source. Attitude changes that come mostly from the central route show greater persistence, better prediction of behaviour and greater resistance to counter-persuasion than changes that come mostly from peripheral cues.

For an administrator the lesson is practical. A health argument aimed at a person ready to reason works by the central route; a popular face on a hoarding works by the peripheral route and fades sooner. A lasting change needs the first.

Social Influence and Persuasion in the Swachh Bharat Mission

The Prime Minister launched the Swachh Bharat Mission at Rajghat, New Delhi, on 2 October 2014 to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management. It put social influence and persuasion to work. Brand ambassadors were named in October 2014, among them the dabbawalas of Mumbai; choosing respected figures invites identification. Volunteers called Swachhagrahis, described as ambassadors of cleanliness, promoted toilet construction through the method of Community-Led Total Sanitation at the village level, which is face-to-face persuasion in the group where the norm is set.

The budget shows where the money went. Of the estimated budget for the rural and urban components, 93 per cent was for construction and the rest for behaviour change campaigns and administration, yet the mission needed both. Toilets made the behaviour possible, and persuasion made people use them. Use of the toilet because the person values a clean surrounding is internalisation, and that is the level that keeps a village open-defecation free; compliance alone fades when the pressure goes.

The mission's own record shows why the attitude matters. Every village, district and State declared itself open-defecation free by 2 October 2019, after more than 100 million toilets were built in rural India, and the second phase, ODF Plus, aims to ensure that open-defecation free behaviours are sustained.

Attitude and Behaviour: When Attitudes Predict Action

Why Behaviour Does Not Always Follow Attitude

Behaviour is usually expected to follow logically from attitude, but an individual's attitudes may not always be exhibited in behaviour, and actual behaviour may be contrary to the attitude. Richard LaPiere, an American social psychologist, asked a Chinese couple to travel across the United States and stay in different hotels in a period when Americans were said to be prejudiced against the Chinese. They were refused service only once. Later, when LaPiere sent questionnaires to hotel and tourist-home managers in the same areas asking if they would take Chinese guests, a very large percentage said they would not. The stated attitude and the actual behaviour did not match.

Attitude and behaviour are consistent under five conditions.

• The attitude is strong and central in the attitude system.
• The person is aware of the attitude.
• There is very little or no external pressure to act in a particular way, such as group pressure to follow a norm.
• The behaviour is not being watched or evaluated by others.
• The person thinks the behaviour will have a positive consequence and so intends to act.

Sometimes the arrow runs the other way and behaviour decides attitude. In the dissonance experiment the students paid only $1 concluded from their own behaviour that they liked the task.

Theory of Planned Behaviour

The theory of planned behaviour, proposed by Icek Ajzen in 1985, explains the gap between attitude and action. It grew out of the theory of reasoned action of 1980 by Martin Fishbein and Ajzen, to which Ajzen added perceived behavioural control. Intention is the nearest predictor of behaviour, and three things shape intention. They are the person's attitude towards the act, the subjective norm (what important others expect) and perceived behavioural control. Where the person's control over the behaviour is incomplete, intention alone cannot predict action.

A district officer can use this directly. A villager may favour a scheme (attitude), but if neighbours disapprove (norm) or the service point is far away (control), the intention never turns into use. Changing the attitude alone is then not enough.

Moral and Political Attitudes

Moral Attitudes: Values as Central Attitudes

A moral attitude is an attitude tied to a value, such as the conviction that one should always be honest because honesty is the best policy. Because a value is part of the person's outlook, a moral attitude is central in the system and hard to change. This is why ethics training aims at values and not at facts alone, and why a moral attitude, once internalised in Kelman's sense, shows up in behaviour even when nobody is watching, because it meets the conditions of strength, awareness and low outside pressure under which attitude predicts behaviour.

Political Attitudes: Reference Groups, Ideology and Exposure

A political attitude is an attitude towards political groups, leaders, issues and ideologies, such as support for democracy. Attitudes towards political, religious and social groups are often developed through reference groups, which is why political attitudes tend to run in families and communities. The media also shape political attitudes, and since they can inform or spread biased material with no check on information, exposure to a range of views, through education and a free media, is part of a healthy democracy.

Attitude in Civil Services

The Attitude a Public Servant Needs

The syllabus names the foundational values for civil service as integrity, impartiality and non-partisanship, objectivity, dedication to public service, and empathy, tolerance and compassion towards the weaker sections. Each one is an attitude with three components, namely a belief that the value matters, a feeling for the people affected and a readiness to act. They are built by the same processes of formation and change that shape any attitude.

• Reward and recognition: Recognition for honest, citizen-friendly work reinforces the right attitude; this is learning by reward.
• Role models: Respected seniors who act with integrity teach by modelling, and identification makes the lesson stick.
• Organisational norms and training: An office culture that expects fairness turns a norm into an attitude over time, and training can make the norm routine.
• Field exposure: Contact with the weaker sections builds empathy that information alone cannot, because personal experience changes attitudes.
• Reflection: Noticing the gap between values and conduct creates dissonance, and dissonance pushes conduct towards the values.

A Positive Attitude Under Stress

A positive attitude is a favourable evaluation with matching feeling and readiness to act, and it matters most in a civil servant who must work under extreme stress. It grows in the same learning settings as any attitude.

• Family and school: They give early associations and models.
• Reference groups: Groups that value service show what is acceptable.
• Personal experience: Problems solved show that effort works.
• Exposure to information: Biographies of self-actualised persons and real cases build belief in hard work.
• Self-esteem: High self-esteem makes a person less easily swayed by others.
• Organisational support: Supportive norms and recognition keep the attitude going.

A positive attitude can therefore be cultivated on purpose.

Bureaucratic and Democratic Attitudes

Public servants show two broad attitudes towards their work, the bureaucratic and the democratic. The bureaucratic attitude follows the classical model of Max Weber, in which an office works through hierarchy, impersonality and fixed rules applied by trained professionals. Its merit is predictability and equal treatment under the rules. Its demerit is that insistence on procedure can make it hard to get things done, which is why the word is also used with a disapproving tone for red tape.

The democratic attitude puts the citizen at the centre as a stakeholder. It is participatory and flexible and decides by listening. Its merit is responsiveness to need; its demerit is the risk of inconsistency and delay if rules are set aside.

The two can be balanced. Rules define the floor of impartial treatment, and flexibility and listening decide how they are applied in the field.

Mission Karmayogi: Building Behavioural Competence

Government training now aims at attitude as well as skill. The Union Cabinet approved the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (Mission Karmayogi) on 2 September 2020. Its principles include a shift from rules-based to roles-based human resource management, emphasis on on-site learning to complement off-site learning, and an opportunity for every civil servant to build behavioural, functional and domain competencies; of these, behavioural competence is the part that concerns attitude. It is delivered through the iGOT Karmayogi online platform and has a Capacity Building Commission as part of its institutional framework. To cover around 46 lakh Central employees, ₹510.86 crore was to be spent over five years from 2020‑21 to 2024‑25.

Sources

• NCERT: Psychology (Class XII), Attitude and Social Cognition
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination 2026 notification (GS Paper IV syllabus)
• Legislative Department: Constitution of India, Articles 15 and 17
• Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation: Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen), About Us
• Press Information Bureau: Cabinet approves Mission Karmayogi (2 September 2020)
• Wikipedia: Attitude (psychology)
• Wikipedia: Functional attitude theory
• Wikipedia: Social influence
• Wikipedia: Elaboration likelihood model
• Wikipedia: Theory of planned behavior
• Wikipedia: Swachh Bharat Mission
• Wikipedia: Bureaucracy
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers