Attitudes

Attitude is a key concept in psychology. Attitudes are positive or negative views of an "attitude object": i.e., a person, behaviour, or event. People can also be "ambivalent" towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative attitude.

Implicit and explicit attitudes
There is also considerable research emerging on "implicit" attitudes, which are attitudes which people are not consciously aware of, but which have real effects as identified through sophisticated experiments using people's response times to stimuli (how quickly they can make judgements about them). Implicit and "explicit" attitudes (i.e. ones people report when they consciously ask themselves how much they like a target objects) both seem to affect people's behaviour, although in different ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases they are. The exact relationship between them is not currently well understood.

Attitude formation
Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience, and there are numerous theories of attitude formation and attitude change, including:
 * Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger
 * Self-perception theory, associated with Daryl Bem
 * Meta programs, associated with NLP
 * Persuasion
 * Social judgment theory
 * Balance theory

Attitude in the workplace
When it comes to Human Resource Management and recruiting, in recent years hire for attitude became a well known mantra. Several commercial tests such as the LAB Profile, iWAM and PAPI were developed to measure work Attitude and motivation, e.g. for pre-employment testing.