Political attitudes

It’s common to hear the term attitude used in conversations. People use attitudes to refer to behavioral states such as aggression, tolerance, and others. However, this term, derived from the social sciences in general and psychology in particular, has a very different, and even opposite, meaning than what most people express.

Human beings, based on our previous or immediate experiences, in our relationship with people, animals and objects in the outside world, react to them with pleasure, rejection or neutrality. When we say that I like the color red, that I don’t like that person, etc., we express an attitude verbally or through gestures.

That is, an attitude is a psychological category that can be understood as a predisposition of people to respond to a particular stimulus in a distinctive way, in other words, it is a greater probability that a person will react to a given experience or information..

Attitude is therefore not a behavior, it is an intermediate variable between the disposition to an object and the probability of a behavior, it can also be understood as “an association between a given object and an evaluation”, [1] understood as the affect, memories, and emotions that the object evokes. “It is the probability of a given behavior occurring in a given type of situation.”  [2]

Allport defines an attitude as “a state of mental and nervous disposition, organized through experience, which exerts a direct or dynamic influence on the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which he is associated.” [3]

Attitudes are a way of organizing our experiences, the manifestation of affect, the emotions that motivate us toward an object, and our evaluation of it. Experience is not only accumulated through direct experience; the transmission of lived experiences also forms our store of knowledge and information. This is why, even if we have never directly interacted with an object, we already have a formed attitude toward it.

For example, if we hear unfavorable things about someone we don’t know, even though we haven’t interacted directly with them, we already have the feeling that they won’t be to our liking, that they’re a bad person. Without knowing them or having interacted with them, we already have a formed attitude toward them.

Stereotypes, prejudices and rumors are part of the arsenal with which we relate to the environment, they are forms of information, but it is information sometimes without direct knowledge and often distorted from reality; —disinformation— attitude plays a vital role in the process known as communication, it is the encounter at skin level, between the internal sensations of the individual and the essence of any object or external organism, therefore, the meaning and interpretation given to the information will only be given by the receiver, which is the result of his predisposition with respect to the sender.

Political attitudes are, therefore, the predispositions we have toward those objects we consider political, that is, those related to the government, politicians, politics, and power. As we can see, attitudes are not behaviors; therefore, they cannot be observed directly. For this purpose, specialized techniques are used to measure the different attitudes a subject has toward an object. These attitudes are plural, because people generally combine a number of attitudes, positive or negative, intense or mild, about things or people. This set of attitudes is articulated so that we can express an opinion in a given situation.

Opinion is the set of attitudes about an object or person expressed verbally, “it is an implicit verbal response that a person gives in response to a particularly stimulating situation in which a general question arises in some way.” [4] While behavior involves a series of complementary elements, such as personality, character, etc., that constitute an expressly direct manifestation of a person or object, in the latter case, opinion does not provide the basis for estimating or predicting behavior, but only the probability that it will occur in a given way, possibly in accordance with the expressed attitudes or opinions.

Mannheim defines opinion as: “the product of the attitudes of an individual who, given certain conditions in his social environment, orders his attitudes in hierarchies. When the individual writes or speaks, he expresses his hierarchy of attitudes: he expresses an opinion. When the external situation changes, variations also occur in the hierarchy of attitudes and new arrangements arise that lead to new opinions. An opinion is, therefore, the expression of an attitude in words.”. [5]

Attitudes serve the purpose of organizing the multiple external stimuli to which we are subjected. They are like a guide or map for social interaction. They provide us with an image of ourselves. They are a structure for acquiring knowledge. They allow us to confront personal problems beyond our control. Finally, they protect us from unwanted aggression and defend our image.

All attitudes arise in one or another of the following ways and have their origin in these sources: 1. in the child’s experiences during his first five or six years of life with respect to his relationships with his parents. 2. In the association between individuals or the encounter of formal or informal groups later in life. 3. In single, isolated experiences or similar experiences throughout life”. [6] The first is called mediated sociocultural influence because it occurs at the level of the primary group (family); the second and third are called direct sociocultural influence because it occurs within the secondary group (school, friends, work, etc.), shaping and giving expression to the peripheral personality. These elements are linked to the process of political socialization, which we will describe below. According to most studies, attitudes are composed of three components: the affective component, the cognitive component, and finally the conative component.

1.5.1 Affective component

The affective component comes from the evaluation we make of the object based on the affection or sympathy it produces in us.

Politics, for example, may seem positive to us and negative to others. These expressions about the object, in dichotomous terms of good-bad, positive-negative, are the component that allows us to evaluate the nature of the probable response to a stimulus; the manifestation of an attitude, whether negative or positive, is known as Direction.

That is, in what direction the subject’s affect is directed. “When we say that an opinion has direction, we mean that it includes a certain emotional or affective quality of approval or rejection of something. It has a pro-anti quality… Explicitly or implicitly, this pro-anti quality is almost always present.” [7]

The possibility of a neutral response is reduced almost to a minimum as we always show a predisposition to an object, since our experience tells us in what sense and how to evaluate it, neutrality could be manifested in two cases, that we do not know the object – although we immediately form a mental image of it – or that the object is not part of our attention – despite this we always have predispositions.