| Attitude | A relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or event or symbols. |
| Attitude formation | The process of forming our attitudes, mainly from our own experiences, the influence of others and our emotional reactions. |
| Acquiescent response set | Tendency to agree with items in an attitude questionnaire. This leads to an ambiguity in interpretation if a high score on an attitude questionnaire can be obtained only by agreeing with all or most items. |
| Automatic activation | According to Fazio, attitudes that have strong evaluative link to situational cues are likely to come automatically to mind from memory. |
| Balance theory | According to Heider people prefer attitudes that are consistent with each other, over those that are inconsistent. A person (P) tires to maintain consistency in attitudes to, and relationships with, other people (O) and elements of the environment(X). |
| Bogus pipeline technique | A measurement technique that leads people to believe that a 'lie detector' can monitor their emotional responses, thus measuring their true attitudes. |
| Cognition | The knowledge, beliefs, thoughts and ideas that people have about themselves and their environment. |
| Cognitive algebra | Approach to the study of impression formation that focuses on how people combine attributes that have valence into an overall positive or negative impression. |
| Cognitive consistency theories | A group of attitude theories stressing that people try to maintain internal consistency, order and agreement among their varying cognitions. |
| Expectancy-value model | Direct experience with an attitude object informs a person how much that object should be liked or disliked in the future. |
| Guttman scale | A scale that contains either favourable or unfavourable statements arranged hierarchically. Agreement with strong statements implies agreement with weaker ones; disagreement with weaker ones implies disagreement with stronger one. |
| Ideology | A systematically interrelated set of beliefs whose primary function is explanation. It circumscribes thinking, making it difficult for the holder to escape from the mould. |
| Implicit association test | Reaction-time test to measure attitudes - particularly unpopular attitudes that people might conceal. |
| Impression management | Peoples use of various strategies to get other people to view them in a positive light. |
| Information integration theory | The idea that a person's attitude can be estimated by averaging across the positive and negative ratings of the object. |
| Information processing | The evaluation of information; in relation to attitude, the means by which people acquire knowledge and form and change attitudes. |
| Likert scale | Scale that evaluates how strongly people agree/disagree with favourable/unfavourable statements about an attitude object. Initially many items are tested. After item analysis, only those items that correlate with each other are retained. |
| Mere exposure effect | Repeated exposure to an object results in greater attraction to that object. |
| Modelling | Tendency for a person to reproduce the actions, attitudes and emotional responses exhibited by a real-life or symbolic model. |
| Multiple act criteria | Term for a general behavioural index based on an average or combination of specific behaviours. |
| One-component attitude model | An attitude consists of affect towards or evaluation of the object. |
| Two-component attitude model | An attitude consists of a mental readiness to act. It also guides judgemental (evaluative) responses. |
| Three-component attitude model | An attitude consists of cognitive, affective and behaviourable components. |
| Priming | Activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that influence how we process new information. |
| Protection motivation theory | Adopting a healthy behaviour requires cognitive balancing between the perceived threat of illness and one's capacity to cope with the health regimen. |
| Relative homogeneity effect | Tendency to see outgroup members as all the same, and ingroup members as more differentiates. |
| Self-efficacy | Expectations that we have about our capacity to succeed in particular tasks. |
| Self-perception theory | Bem's idea that we gain knowledge of ourselves only by making self-attribution. We infer out own attitudes from our behaviour. |
| Social representation | Collectively elaborated explanations of unfamiliar and complex phenomena that transform them into a simple form. |
| Sociocognitive model | An attitude theory highlighting an evaluative component. knowledge of an object is represented in memory along with a summary of how to appraise it. |
| Spreading attitude effect | A liked or disliked person (or attitude object) may affect not only the evaluation of a second person directly associated but also others merely associated with the second person. |
| Terror management theory | The notion that the most fundamental human motivation is to reduce the terror of the inevitability of death. Self-esteem may be centrally implicated in effective terror management. |
| Theory of planned behaviour | Modification by Ajzen of the theory of reasoned action. It suggests that predicting a behaviour from an attitude measure is improved if people believe they have control over that behaviour. |
| Theory of reasoned action | Fishbein and Ajzen model of the links between attitude and behaviour. A major feature is the proposition that the best way to predict a behaviour is to ask whether the person intends to do it. |
| Values | A higher order concept thought to provide a structure for organising attitudes. |
