Ranked from most heritable to least heritable.

Table 5.1 Heritability of Some Attitudes Attitude

These attitudes form earlier and are stronger and more resistant to change than others (Bourgeois, 2002), although it is not yet known why some attitudes are more genetically determined than are others. most strongly determined by genetic variation among people). Table 5.1 “Heritability of Some Attitudes” shows some of the attitudes that have been found to be the most highly heritable (i.e. Some of our attitudes are shared by others (most of us like sugar, fear snakes, and are disgusted by cockroaches), whereas other attitudes-such as our preferences for different styles of music or art-are more individualized. Still other attitudes are learned via the media (Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2003 Levina, Waldo, & Fitzgerald, 2000) or through our interactions with friends (Poteat, 2007). We may like to ride roller coasters in part because our genetic code has given us a thrill-loving personality and in part because we’ve had some really great times on roller coasters in the past. Other attitudes are learned mostly through direct and indirect experiences with the attitude objects (De Houwer, Thomas, & Baeyens, 2001). Research has found that some of our attitudes are inherited, at least in part, via genetic transmission from our parents (Olson, Vernon, Harris, & Jang, 2001).

Each of our attitudes has its own unique characteristics, and no two attitudes come to us or influence us in quite the same way. Statements such as these make it clear that attitudes are an important part of the self-concept-attitudes tie the self-concept to the attitude object, and so our attitudes are an essential part of “us.”Įvery human being holds thousands of attitudes, including those about family and friends, political parties and political figures, abortion rights and terrorism, preferences for music, and much more. When we express our attitudes-for instance, when we say, “I love Cheerios,” “I hate snakes,” “I’m crazy about Bill,” or “I like Italians”-we are expressing the relationship (either positive or negative) between the self and an attitude object. When we say that attitudes are evaluations, we mean that they involve a preference for or against the attitude object, as commonly expressed in such terms as prefer, like, dislike, hate, and love.

Major theories of social psychology