Positive Attitude Formation Theory

An attitude is the value a person assigns to something or someone. For example, individuals have differing attitudes against all kinds of aspects such as immunisations, asylum seekers and people with disabilities. People may have either a negative or positive attitude towards these particular examples because of numerous internal and external factors. Attitude formation theories help us understand how another person’s attitude takes shape and why people have these specific beliefs. Often, peoples attitudes about something will reflect in their behaviour and how they act towards it.

According to Fazio and Olson, an attitude is an “organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols” (Vaughan & Hogg, 2014, p.597). Fazio and Olson’s definition of attitudes relate to the ABC attitude formation theory. The theory is that attitudes can be divided into three seperate components; affective, behavioural and cognitive. The affective component involves an individual’s feelings or emotion about an object. The behavioural component involves the way in which attitudes influence the way we act or behave and the

Media is every where and because of this we can not escape being influenced by media. The media is one of the major external factors in our lifestyles that affects how we feel about people with disabilities. Most recently in the 2015 Melbourne Cup, the winner of the main race, Michelle Payne, had a brother, Steven Payne, who had down syndrome. There was a lot of publicity focused on Steven Payne because he was the strapper which is a heavy role including feeding and grooming the horse. This caused a lot of positive publicity for people with down syndrome because it proved to society that people with intellectual disabilities can live the same life as an average person despite their