Q.Which method of message transmission is likely to be most effective for creating a positive attitude towards Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) for young children?

Attitude Formation Theories

The Intuition

Think about why you like or dislike something. You have never been bitten by a dog, yet you feel uneasy around stray dogs. You have never tasted a particular dish, but the smell alone makes you want it. You have never been told directly that a certain political party is bad, yet you find yourself agreeing with people who criticise it.

How do these likes and dislikes — these attitudes — come into existence? They are not born with you. They are formed. And they are formed in more than one way. Sometimes you build an attitude by thinking carefully; sometimes you absorb it without thinking at all. Sometimes one powerful experience stamps an attitude into you; sometimes a thousand small, unnoticed exposures do the same.

Attitude formation theories are simply attempts to answer: How did I come to feel this way?

The Precise Statement

An attitude is a learned, relatively enduring evaluation of a person, object, idea, or event — it has three components: cognitive (beliefs), affective (emotions), and behavioural (action tendencies). Attitude formation is the process by which such evaluations are acquired.

There are four major theoretical explanations for how attitudes form:

1. Learning Theory

This is the most intuitive. You learn attitudes the same way you learn anything else.

Classical conditioning: A neutral object gets paired with something that already triggers a positive or negative feeling. A new brand of phone (neutral) is shown alongside a celebrity you admire (positive). Over time, the phone itself feels positive. This works for fear too — a child who sees a parent react with fear to a spider may themselves develop a fear of spiders.

Operant conditioning: You express an attitude and get rewarded or punished. You say "I love classical music" at a family dinner, and your grandfather beams with pride. You are more likely to hold that attitude in the future. Conversely, if you express a political opinion and get shouted down, you may suppress or change that attitude.

Observational learning: You watch others and imitate their attitudes. A child watches their parent complain about a particular brand. Without any direct negative experience, the child adopts the same complaint. This is how cultural and family attitudes pass down — you absorb them by watching.

2. Cognitive Dissonance Theory

This theory is less obvious but very powerful. It says: when your actions contradict your beliefs, you feel an uncomfortable tension called cognitive dissonance. To reduce that tension, you change your attitude — not your behaviour.

The classic example: You work very hard to get into a club. The club turns out to be boring. If you admit it is boring, then all your effort was wasted. That is uncomfortable. So instead, you convince yourself the club is actually quite interesting — you justify your effort by changing your attitude.

Insufficient justification: You are paid a small amount to lie to someone (say, telling them a boring task was fun). Since the payment is too small to be a good reason for lying, you experience dissonance. To resolve it, you actually start believing the task was fun. If you had been paid a large amount, you would have had sufficient external justification — no dissonance, no attitude change.

3. Functional Theory

This theory asks a different question: not how attitudes form, but why we hold them. The answer: attitudes serve functions.