Describe various components of attitude and discuss factors that influence attitude formation.

Components of attitude

• Social psychology’s ABC model names three components: affective, behavioural, and cognitive.
• The affective component is feeling: like, fear, pride, or disgust toward the object, such as warmth toward a uniform or contempt toward a queue.
• The cognitive component is belief and information: what the person holds as true, including stereotypes that may be false.
• The behavioural component is the action tendency: approach, avoid, donate, or delay, even when the act is not yet done.
• Gordon Allport treated attitude as a mental and neural state of readiness; Festinger showed that act and feeling can clash until one yields, which is cognitive dissonance.
• For administration, a clerk may believe in equality (cognitive), feel irritation at a poor applicant (affective), and still stall the file (behavioural); ethics training must touch all three.

Factors that form attitude

• Family and early socialisation plant the first likes and hates, including caste, gender, and ‘people like us’.
• Peers, school, and workplace norms reward some evaluations and punish others.
• Direct experience is powerful: a fair hearing can soften prejudice; a humiliating thana can harden distrust of the State.
• Culture, religion, and media, including social media algorithms, supply ready-made evaluations.
• Instrumental learning and classical association: a scheme that paid on time produces a positive attitude to the department; a bribe culture associates the counter with fear.
• Personality, education, and reference groups, including a service academy, can later rebuild attitudes through new models.
• The Second ARC’s ethics training and citizen-centric reforms assume attitudes can be reshaped by example, appraisal, and contact with the public, not by a circular alone.