Characteristics of Attitude

Characteristics of Attitudes

Written Report

1. ATTITUDES ARE LEARNED

        “People are not born with attitude”. No one is born biased and judgmental, attitude is acquired through the course of socialization in our childhood and adolescence. The baby cannot speak his/her opinion, act and behave in the way he/she see things in his/her environment. Everything is a matter of time, and interacting with other people is the greatest factor that can affect our actions and opinions. “Children don’t naturally discriminate against kids with different skin color or religious preferences. Over time, kids acquire prejudiced attitudes. Or to be blunter, they learn to hate”. In our early childhood, we see the world as beautiful, peaceful and wonderful, every people is kind and nice. But as we grow and step outside to see the real world, socialize and learn things around, we got to be more confuse or upset by what we believed in so many years. Now we started to see things differently, we judged in our differences and the worst, we learned to say harsh words towards other people and hurt them with our actions.

        Good thing is “not all attitudes are so negatives”. No matter how bad a person is, there’s always a good side of it. Not all attitude people acquired are bad, sometimes people who have positive sentiments toward all sorts of things, like hometown sports teams, teachers who lift our spirits, children, pets, cool cars and you get the drift have, that’s a positive attitude out there.

        People’s attitudes vary widely. They depend to a considerable degree on what individuals have learned in their course of cultural and social upbringing. It varies on their faith by what they believed, on how they respond to issues, on which food they like, on what race they belong and so on. It was believed that attitudes depend on their religious background and the cultural landscape in which a person is raised.

        On scientific explanation, some researchers have guessed that the attitude of a person is contained with his/her genetic component. Tesser (1993) acknowledged that there is not “a gene for attitudes toward jazz in the same way as there is a gene for eye color”. He argued that inherited physical differences in taste and hearing might influence attitudes toward food and loud rock music. However, there is not enough evidence on Tesser’s speculation that genes can influence behavior. And even it is claimed to be true, environment will always have large impact on how we see things and molds our perceptions. “Attitudes are develop through encounters with social objects” and that is by interacting and communicating with other people.