Attitude and Social Cognition

This is the sixth chapter of NCERT's Class 12 Psychology textbook (pages 104–119 of the 2026-27 reprint). After a short note on explaining social behaviour, it covers the nature and components of attitudes, their formation and change, the attitude–behaviour relationship, prejudice and discrimination, and strategies for handling prejudice. It has one activity, Boxes 6.1–6.2, Figures 6.1–6.3 (drawings), a panel on LaPiere's study, seven review questions and two project ideas. Despite the title, the reprint has no sections on attribution, impression formation or pro-social behaviour; a marked Beyond-NCERT section below supplies the essentials.

• Builds on the live Class 11 chapters What is Psychology? (social psychology as a field) and Learning (classical and operant conditioning and observational learning — the very processes by which attitudes are learned here), and the Class 12 chapters Self and Personality (self-esteem, which affects persuasibility), Meeting Life Challenges (a positive attitude under stress) and Therapeutic Approaches (Ellis's and Beck's change of beliefs — the clinical cousin of attitude change).
• Leads into Chapter 7 (Social Influence and Group Processes), which NCERT says carries social identity and intergroup conflict further.
• UPSC: this is the main home of the GS4 syllabus line ‘Attitude: content, structure, function; its influence and relation with thought and behaviour; moral and political attitudes; social influence and persuasion’. UPSC has asked what factors form attitudes towards social problems (2014), how attitudes acquired unconsciously from family can be changed (2016), how social influence and persuasion could help Swachh Bharat (2016), how to build a suitable attitude in a public servant (2021), to distinguish bureaucratic and democratic attitudes (2015), and set a case on two communities in conflict (2026) that calls on the chapter's account of prejudice and its reduction. Essay and GS1/GS2 themes on social reform, gender attitudes and campaigns also draw on it.

• Attitude = a state of mind about an attitude object with an evaluation plus emotion and a tendency to act: A-B-C — affective, behavioural (conative), cognitive (Box 6.1, ‘green environment’). Beliefs = the cognitive base; values = beliefs with a ‘should’ — hardest to change.
• Four properties: valence, extremeness, simplicity or complexity (multiplexity), centrality. Formation by association, reward and punishment, modelling, group norms, information; factors: family and school, reference groups, personal experience, media.
• Change: Heider's balance (P-O-X; balanced = all + or two − and one +), Festinger's dissonance (pan masala; Box 6.2: $1 group liked the task more), Mohsin's two-step (identification, then the source changes first). Both balance and dissonance are cognitive consistency.
• What changes attitudes: the existing attitude (congruent easier than incongruent), the source (credibility, attractiveness), the message (rational or emotional appeal, motives, too much fear backfires, face-to-face mode), the target (persuasibility, prejudice, self-esteem, intelligence).
• Attitudes and behaviour may diverge — LaPiere's Chinese couple; behaviour can shape attitude (Box 6.2). Five conditions for consistency. Prejudice (attitude) ↔ stereotype (cognitive) ↔ discrimination (behaviour); each can exist alone.
• Sources of prejudice: learning, ingroup bias, scapegoating, kernel of truth, self-fulfilling prophecy. Handling: education, contact (cooperative, close, equal status), individual identity. Beyond NCERT: attribution, Asch, bystander effect, Kelman.

Social psychology deals with all behaviour that takes place in the actual, imagined or implied presence of others (Class 11). Because of social influences, people form views or attitudes that exist as behavioural tendencies; to understand them one must study both social-cognitive processes and social behaviour, going beyond common sense and folk wisdom. NCERT starts with a mental exercise: the blanks in ‘In my opinion…’ are opinions; when such views also carry emotion and action, they are attitudes.

All definitions agree that an attitude is a state of the mind — a set of views or thoughts about a topic (the attitude object) with an evaluative feature (positive, negative or neutral), accompanied by an emotional component and a tendency to act. The thought component is the cognitive aspect, the emotional the affective aspect, and the tendency to act the behavioural (or conative) aspect — together the A-B-C components. Attitudes are not themselves behaviour but a tendency to behave; they are part of cognition and cannot be observed from outside. They provide a mental ‘layout’ or ‘blueprint’ that makes it easier to decide how to act in new situations.

Beliefs and values. Beliefs are the cognitive component of attitudes, the ground on which they stand — belief in God, or in democracy as a political ideology. Values are attitudes or beliefs with a ‘should’ or ‘ought’ — that one should work hard, or always be honest. A value forms when a belief or attitude becomes an inseparable part of one's outlook on life, so values are difficult to change.

Besides the A-B-C components, attitudes have four significant features. Valence tells whether an attitude is positive or negative: on a 5-point scale for nuclear research — 1 very bad, 2 bad, 3 neutral, 4 good, 5 very good — ratings of 4 or 5 are positive, 1 or 2 negative, 3 neutral. Extremeness tells how positive or negative: 1 is as extreme as 5, only opposite in direction; 2 and 4 are less extreme; neutral is lowest. Simplicity or complexity (multiplexity) refers to how many ‘member’ attitudes sit within a broader attitude: an attitude to a particular person is usually simple; an attitude to health and well-being is complex, made of attitudes to physical and mental health, happiness, and how to achieve them. Each member attitude has its own A-B-C components — do not confuse members with components. Centrality is the role of an attitude in its system: a central attitude influences the others far more than peripheral ones — in an attitude to world peace, a negative attitude to high military expenditure may be the core.

Attitudes are formed as we interact with others. In general they are learned through one's own experience and interaction with others; a few studies suggest some inborn aspect, but genetic factors act only indirectly, along with learning. NCERT names five processes: (1) association — students come to like a subject because they see positive qualities in its teacher; (2) reward and punishment — a teenager who does yogasanas and is named ‘Miss Good Health’ develops a positive attitude to yoga, and a child who keeps falling ill from junk food turns against it; (3) modelling — children form respect for elders by watching parents show respect and be appreciated for it; (4) group or cultural norms — unwritten rules, such as making offerings at a place of worship, that become part of social cognition; learning through norms may combine the first three; and (5) exposure to information — media, or biographies of self-actualised persons that build a positive attitude to hard work.

Four factors give the context for this learning. (1) Family and school environment — parents and family in the early years, then school, through association, reward and punishment and modelling. (2) Reference groups, which show the norms of acceptable behaviour and thinking about politics, religion, social groups, occupations and national issues, and matter most at the beginning of adolescence, when belonging is important. (3) Personal experiences — NCERT's real-life example: an army driver who narrowly escaped death when all his companions were killed gave up his job, returned to his native village in Maharashtra and worked as a community leader, completely changing the village. (4) Media-related influences — audio-visual media, the Internet and school textbooks first strengthen the cognitive and affective components and then may affect behaviour; they inform people better, but with no check on the information they can create consumerist attitudes as well as attitudes that foster social harmony.

Attitudes still forming, and more like opinions, change far more readily than attitudes that have become part of a person's values. Community leaders, politicians, producers of consumer goods and advertisers all want to know how attitudes change. NCERT gives three concepts.

(a) Balance — Fritz Heider. The P-O-X triangle links P (the person whose attitude is studied), O (another person) and X (the attitude object); all three may be persons. An attitude changes when the P-O, O-X and P-X relations are imbalanced, because imbalance is logically uncomfortable. Imbalance: all three sides negative, or two positive and one negative. Balance: all three positive, or two negative and one positive. NCERT's example: P favours dowry, O (whose daughter P's son is to marry) opposes it, and O likes P — two positives and a negative, so imbalance. Balance returns if P turns against dowry, O comes to accept it, or O starts disliking P.

(b) Cognitive dissonance — Leon Festinger. This stresses the cognitive component: the cognitions in an attitude must be consonant, logically in line. If two are dissonant, one is changed towards consonance. NCERT's example: ‘Pan masala causes mouth cancer, which is fatal’ and ‘I eat pan masala’ feel out of tune; stopping pan masala (changing the second cognition) is the healthy, logical way to reduce the dissonance. Festinger and Carlsmith showed dissonance at work (Box 6.2). Balance and dissonance are both examples of cognitive consistency: elements of an attitude system must fall in line; if not, mental discomfort pushes some element to change.

(c) The two-step concept — S.M. Mohsin, an Indian psychologist. In Step I, the target (whose attitude is to change) identifies with the source (through whom change comes): the target likes and regards the source and tries to feel like her or him, and the source shows positive feelings for the target, so regard becomes mutual. In Step II, the source herself or himself changes behaviour towards the attitude object; observing this, the target changes too — imitation, or observational learning. NCERT's example: Preeti enjoys a soft drink she reads is harmful; her favourite sportsperson, who has been advertising it, first shows warmth for fans and then actually gives up the drink for a health drink — and Preeti follows.

The existing attitude. All four properties matter: in general, positive attitudes are easier to change than negative ones; extreme and central attitudes are harder to change than less extreme and peripheral ones; simple attitudes are easier to change than multiple ones. Direction matters too. A change may be congruent — the same direction, as when a somewhat positive attitude to women's empowerment grows more positive after reading about a successful woman — or incongruent — the opposite direction, as when the same story makes someone fear that women may become ‘too powerful’ and neglect family responsibilities. Congruent change is easier. A message may also push attitudes away from its intent: posters on brushing strengthen positive attitudes to dental care, but frightening pictures of cavities may be disbelieved; some fear persuades, but too much fear turns the receiver off.

Source characteristics — credibility and attractiveness. Adults buying a laptop trust a computer engineer more than a schoolchild; schoolchildren may trust another schoolchild more (Figure 6.1); some products such as cars sell better when promoted by popular public figures rather than experts. Message characteristics: just enough information, neither too much nor too little; a rational or emotional appeal (Figure 6.2's pressure cooker: saving cooking gas versus caring for the family's nutrition); the motives it activates (milk for health and looks, or energy and job success); and the mode — face-to-face transmission usually beats letters, pamphlets or mass media (Figure 6.3); television and the Internet are similar to face-to-face contact but no substitute for it. Target characteristics: persuasibility (open, flexible people change more — advertisers benefit most from them), strong prejudices (less change), self-esteem (low self-esteem, more change) and intelligence (more intelligent people may change less — or sometimes more willingly, because their attitudes rest on information and thought).

We expect behaviour to follow from attitudes, but it may not, and behaviour may even run against an attitude. Psychologists have found consistency when (1) the attitude is strong and central; (2) the person is aware of it; (3) there is little or no external pressure, such as group pressure to follow a norm; (4) the behaviour is not watched or evaluated by others; and (5) the person expects a positive consequence and so intends to act.

Sometimes behaviour decides the attitude: in Box 6.2, students who called a boring task interesting for only $1 concluded from their own behaviour that the task must have been interesting.

Prejudices are attitudes towards a particular group, usually negative and often based on stereotypes — clusters of ideas about a group's characteristics, assumed to apply to all its members and often undesirable. The stereotype is the cognitive component; dislike or hatred the affective; discrimination — treating a target group less positively than a favoured one — the behavioural. History has many examples of discrimination based on race and social class or caste; NCERT calls the Nazi genocide against Jewish people an extreme example of prejudice leading to hatred, discrimination and mass killing. Prejudice can exist without discrimination and discrimination without prejudice, but they often go together, and where they exist intergroup conflict is likely. NCERT notes that our own society has seen deplorable instances of discrimination, with and without prejudice, based on gender, religion, community, caste, physical disability and illnesses such as AIDS; law can curb discriminatory behaviour, but the cognitive and emotional components of prejudice are harder to change.

Sources of prejudice. (1) Learning — through association, reward and punishment, observing others, norms and information, via family, reference groups, personal experience and media; those who learn prejudice may develop a ‘prejudiced personality’ with low adjusting capacity, anxiety and hostility to the outgroup. (2) A strong social identity and ingroup bias — boosting one's own group by holding negative attitudes to others. (3) Scapegoating — a majority blaming a minority outgroup, too weak or small to defend itself, for its own social, economic or political problems; a group way of expressing frustration. (4) The kernel of truth — believing there must be some truth in what everyone says, with a few examples enough to sustain it. (5) Self-fulfilling prophecy — the target group may behave in ways that confirm the negative expectation, as when a group described as ‘dependent’ comes to behave dependently, strengthening the prejudice.

Knowing the sources is the first step. Strategies work if they aim at (a) minimising opportunities to learn prejudice, (b) changing such attitudes, (c) de-emphasising a narrow ingroup identity, and (d) discouraging self-fulfilling prophecy among the victims of prejudice. The means: education and information that correct stereotypes and tackle strong ingroup bias; increased intergroup contact, which allows direct communication, removes mistrust and lets people discover positive qualities in the outgroup — but only if the groups meet in a cooperative rather than competitive context, interact closely enough to know each other, and are not different in power or status; and highlighting individual identity over group identity, weakening the group as a basis for judging others. NCERT leaves social identity and intergroup conflict to the next chapter.

Attribution is how we explain behaviour — our own and others'. Fritz Heider (1958) distinguished internal (dispositional) causes in the person from external (situational) causes. Harold Kelley's covariation model (1967) says we use three cues: consensus (do others act the same way?), distinctiveness (does the person act this way only in this situation?) and consistency (every time?). Two well-known biases: the fundamental attribution error, a term coined by Lee Ross (1977) for over-weighting personal causes and under-weighting the situation when judging others; and the actor–observer difference described by Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett — we explain our own actions by the situation and others' by their character.

Impression formation. In Solomon Asch's 1946 studies, two lists of traits identical except for ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ produced very different overall impressions: some traits are central and organise the rest, and early information can weigh more than later information (a primacy effect).

Pro-social behaviour and the bystander effect. Pro-social behaviour is acting to benefit others — helping, sharing, cooperating. John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968) found that people are less likely to help in an emergency when others are present — the bystander effect — partly through diffusion of responsibility. Their research was prompted by the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, though the original newspaper account of many passive witnesses is now regarded as exaggerated. Latané and Darley described helping as a sequence of decisions.

The chapter has one activity and two project ideas. Short outlines follow. Surveys and ratings should be done with consent and kept anonymous.

The seven review questions at the end of the chapter (page 118). Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• An attitude is a tendency to act, not behaviour itself.
• Beliefs are the cognitive base of attitudes; values add a ‘should’.
• Values are hardest to change; attitudes still forming change most easily.
• A central attitude shapes the others in its system.
• Most attitudes are learned; genes act only indirectly.
• Reference groups matter most at the beginning of adolescence.
• Imbalance in the P-O-X triangle pushes an attitude towards balance.
• Dissonance: clashing cognitions are brought back into line.
• In Box 6.2 the smaller reward produced the bigger attitude change.
• Mohsin: first identification, then the source changes and the target imitates.
• Congruent change is easier than incongruent change.
• Too much fear turns the receiver off.
• Face-to-face communication beats mass media.
• Attitudes do not always predict behaviour — LaPiere.
• Contact reduces prejudice only when cooperative, close and between equals.

Traps to avoid

• Conative = behavioural component, not cognitive.
• Equal extremeness, opposite valence: ratings 1 and 5.
• Member attitudes (multiplexity) are not the A-B-C components.
• Two positives and one negative in P-O-X is imbalance, not balance.
• The $1 group, not the $20 group, rated the boring task more interesting.
• S.M. Mohsin, not Kelman, gave NCERT's two-step concept.
• Positive attitudes are easier to change than negative ones (NCERT).
• Low self-esteem makes attitude change easier, not harder.
• LaPiere: behaviour was positive, questionnaire answers negative.
• Stereotype is the cognitive part; prejudice is the whole attitude; discrimination is behaviour.
• Scapegoating is a majority blaming a weaker minority.
• NCERT's summary says ‘cognitive consonance’; the theory is cognitive dissonance.
• Attribution, impression formation and the bystander effect are not in the current reprint.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• No Prelims question in the bank is taught here. Likely future items: researcher ↔ concept matches (Heider–balance, Festinger–dissonance, Mohsin–two-step, LaPiere–attitude versus behaviour, Allport–contact, Kelman–compliance, identification and internalisation); the A-B-C components (conative = behavioural); balanced versus imbalanced P-O-X sign patterns; Box 6.2's $1 result; and stereotype versus prejudice versus discrimination.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS4 — formation of attitudes: 2014 asked what factors form attitudes to social problems and how to explain contrasting attitudes to the caste system; 2016 asked how attitudes and values absorbed unconsciously from family can be changed in citizens of a modern democracy; 2021 asked how to build a suitable attitude in a public servant. Use the five processes and four factors, then the change toolkit (dissonance, two-step, source–message–target) and, for caste, NCERT's account of prejudice as a learned attitude that law curbs in behaviour faster than in thought and feeling — no partisan comment.
• GS4 — persuasion: 2016 asked how social influence and persuasion could make Swachh Bharat succeed. Walk through source, message, mode and target, Mohsin's two-step (leaders first), dissonance (pledges), reference-group norms and Figure 6.3's face-to-face lesson; add the ethics of persuasion as attributed positions.
• GS4 — kinds of attitude in public service: 2015 asked to distinguish bureaucratic and democratic attitudes and whether they can be balanced. Define attitude with its A-B-C and properties; treat each as an attitude system with a different central attitude (rules and hierarchy versus participation and responsiveness); balance through congruent change and training. The weakest of the links kept.
• GS4 — communities in conflict: the 2026 case of two communities in violent conflict in a border district draws on sources of prejudice (ingroup bias, scapegoating) and NCERT's strategies (education, cooperative equal-status contact, individual identity), with Sherif's superordinate goals Beyond NCERT; immediate law and order comes from other GS4 material.
• Answer frame: define the attitude (A-B-C, properties) → how it formed (processes and factors) → why it persists (centrality, values, consistency) → how to change it (balance, dissonance, two-step; source–message–target; contact for prejudice) → the attitude–behaviour gap and how to close it → one-line conclusion.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

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