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People with a positive dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to like things, whereas people with a negative dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to dislike things, according to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“The dispositional attitude construct
represents a new perspective in which attitudes are not simply a function of
the properties of the stimuli under consideration, but are also a function of
the properties of the evaluator,” wrote the authors. “[For example], at first glance, it may not
seem useful to know someone’s feelings about architecture when assessing their
feelings about health care. After all, health care and architecture are
independent stimuli with unique sets of properties, so attitudes toward these
objects should also be independent.”
A matter of focus
However, they note, there is still one critical factor that an individual’s attitudes will have in common: the individual who formed the attitudes. “Some people may simply be more prone to focusing on positive features and others on negative features,” Hepler said.
To discover whether people differ in the
tendency to like or dislike things, Hepler and Albarracín created a scale that
requires people to report their attitudes toward a wide variety of unrelated
stimuli, such as architecture, cold showers, politics, and soccer. Upon knowing
how much people (dis)like these specific things, the responses were then
averaged together to calculate their dispositional attitude (i.e., to calculate
how much they tend to like or dislike things in general).
Negative attitudes
The theory is that if individuals differ in the general tendency to like versus dislike objects, attitudes toward independent objects may actually be related. Throughout the studies the researchers found that people with generally positive dispositional attitudes are more open than people with generally negative dispositional attitudes. In day-to-day practice, this means that people with positive dispositional attitudes may be more prone to actually buy new products, get vaccine shots, follow regular positive actions (recycling, driving carefully etc.)
“This surprising and novel discovery
expands attitude theory by demonstrating that an attitude is not simply a
function of an object’s properties, but it is also a function of the properties
of the individual who evaluates the object,” concluded Hepler and Albarracín.
“Overall, the present research provides clear support for the dispositional
attitude as a meaningful construct that has important implications for attitude
theory and research.”
