How are attitudes defined?

Attitudes are fundamentally defined as evaluations of people, objects, and ideas. This definition captures the essence of attitudes, which represent our responses to things we encounter in our environment. These evaluations can be positive, negative, or neutral and reflect how we feel about various stimuli.

Attitudes influence behavior and decision-making and can be shaped by multiple factors like personal experiences, social influences, and cultural norms. They play a crucial role in how individuals interact with the world around them and can predispose them to act in certain ways towards specific entities.

In contrast, behaviors in response to stimuli focus more on observable actions rather than the evaluations that underpin those actions, while emotional responses emphasize feelings without necessarily referring to the evaluative aspect of attitudes. Unconscious thoughts relate to cognitive processes that may not surface in our conscious thinking, diverging from the explicit evaluations that define attitudes.