Can Your Surroundings Affect Your Attitude?

What is attitude? Attitude is stated as a tendency to respond positively or negatively to other people or to their decisions.

Attitude remains relatively stable and comes about in several ways. It comes through an accumulation of experiences, through tending to focus feelings in specific ways, through some trauma or dramatic experience. We develop attitudes through contact with other people. Attitudes relate to age, to sex and to personality characteristics. Mostly, we tend to think of attitudes as being negative - anti this or anti- that. But attitudes also can relate to positive values, such as an attitude favorable towards education.

An individual from a culturally deprived environment who holds an array of hostile attitudes may change when he is given an opportunity for education. A person from a privileged culture, who has always held to a democratic attitude, may become negative towards some people because of an unfortunate experience. Again, through continued association with others holding similar attitudes, one can be influenced in a positive or negative direction. Here, attitudes of both the individual and the social climate are important.

Attitudes are even expressed by the use of a different subculture speech. For example, one problem faced by teachers from a middle-class environment teaching in actually deprived schools is that of two different languages. Even the same words may convey the opposite attitudes of two such groups.

In a study¹, students were given several scales measuring political and economic attitudes and it was found that the group as a whole was mostly conservative. Though the college was liberal in its functioning, the students had come from well-to-do homes with conservative parents. By the end of a year, most students held more liberal attitudes and even some girls who had been very conservative were also found to be extremely liberal in outlook. However, a few students remained imperious to the various influences that produced changes in most other students; and some actually resisted these influences. It came out in interviews that these students had always remained identified with the attitudes of their families and had not made themselves identified as one among the others.

For the person observing his own attitudes to satisfy his personal needs better, three conditions are important for change. First, change is enhanced if the expression of the new attitude is unexpectedly rewarding. Second, change is enhanced if the person feels he is using his own ideas. And third, it is important to examine the climates in which he gets his satisfactions and his dissatisfactions. People tend to perceive satisfaction as coming from their environment. The work environment is a good place to observe our need satisfactions because we spend so much time there.

Citations:

¹http://www.personal-development.com/chuck/negativethinking.htm

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_(psychology)