Human beings have a need to interact with and relate to others and to explain their own as well as others’ behaviour. Because of these social interactions, people form attitudes about other individuals and also about different issues in life. These attitudes have an evaluative feature, are accompanied by an emotional component and a tendency to act in a particular way with respect to the attitude object. Negative attitudes towards others, called prejudices may be based on stereotypes. These stereotypes often assumes that all members of a specific group possess certain undesirable characteristics which leads to the formation of negative attitudes towards members of that group. Prejudice has many other sources and often creates conflict within a society. Awareness about these sources would be the one of the steps in handling these prejudices.
A-B-C Components of Attitude stands for :
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → Affective-Behavioral-Cognitive
An attitude has three parts: the thought component (cognitive), the emotional component (affective) and the tendency to act (behavioural or conative). Together they are the A-B-C components, Affective-Behavioural-Cognitive.
Option (1) Affective-Behavioral-Competence — Incorrect. Competence, being able to do something well, is not a part of an attitude; the ‘C’ stands for the thought component.
Option (3) Affective-Behavioral-Complexity — Incorrect. Simplicity or complexity is a property of an attitude (how many smaller attitudes make it up), like valence, extremeness and centrality. A property describes an attitude; it is not one of its components.
Option (4) Affective-Behavioral-Centrality — Incorrect. Centrality is another property: the role of a particular attitude in the attitude system. Again a feature, not the thought component.
NCERT (2025-26): “Nature and Components of Attitudes … All definitions of attitudes agree that an attitude is a state of the mind, a set of views, or thoughts, regarding some topic (called the ‘attitude object’), which have an evaluative feature (positive, negative or neutral quality). It is accompanied by an emotional component, and a tendency to act in a particular way with regard to the attitude object. The thought component is referred to as the cognitive aspect, the emotional component is known as the affective aspect, and the tendency to act is called the behavioural (or conative) aspect. Taken together, these three aspects have been referred to as the A-B-C components (Affective-Behavioural-Cognitive components) of attitude.…” |