Attitudes are established based on earlier encounters and assist individuals in making sense of their surroundings. In this case, attitudes play a critical role during life and comprise of a broader part of day-to-day emotions, thoughts, and behavioral processes. (Albarracin & Handley, 2011) If earlier experiences lack, such as it were the case with unfamiliar attitude things, individuals would still develop attitudes instantly to allow them respond to situations in which they lack familiarity or attitude objects. Whereas attitudes are created for both unfamiliar and familiar things, the means of creating the attitudes might differ (Hogg & Cooper, 2007) . Thus, the paper discusses the impacts if cognition, affect, and behavior on attitude formation and the different functions attitudes serve.
Impact of Cognition, Affect, and Cognition on Attitude Formation
Cognitive Attitude Formation
Cognitive theories related toward formation of attitude emphasize on informational and reasoned strategies for creating attitudes. To begin with, for instance, individuals receive information, assess it, and decide on the position that they should take (Albarracin & Handley, 2011) . In this vein, cognitions assist in forming attitudes when persons believe that an attitude object has desirable or undesirable attitudes or that it would result to desired or undesired outcomes (Irimia, 2010) . The other way in which cognition influences attitude formation revolves around the expectancy-value model. According to the model, people reach an attitude toward a certain object when they sum up the anticipated values of an attitude object’s attributes (Castelli & Carraro, 2011) . Evaluating the positives and negatives makes it possible to identify the favorable attitude.
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Affective Attitude Formation
Affect entails emotion. Thus, an attitude created via affect has solid emotional elements. The process influences attitude formation via instrumental conditioning and classical conditioning. For instrumental conditioning, it emphasizes on punishments and rewards. In this case, a neutral stimulus emerges, while it receives rewards from the environment. This form of accidental pairing is affiliated with the reward in an unconscious manner (Albarracin & Handley, 2011) . As such, it is possible for a person to establish positive attitudes toward the initial neutral stimulus. By contrast, punishing the neutral stimulus due to inadvertent pairing can lead to instrumental association, which would lead to a negative attitude toward the initial stimulus (Hogg & Cooper, 2007) . Classical conditioning serves as the other effect than affect has on attitude formation. When it comes to classical conditioning, the actions of an individual lead to a conditioned response, which emanated from modeled or observed behavior of other people. This might be the case where a kid observes the behavior of older individuals that leads to punishments and rewards, hence conditioning their individual behavior (Castelli & Carraro, 2011) . The kids understand what they need to do to attain rewards and what they should avoid to ensure they are not punished.
Behavioral Attitude Formation
Regarding the impact of behavior on attitude formation, one of the major influence is attributed to the self-perception theory. Here, when the attitude of a person is unclear, the individual usually reflects on behavior in order to get answers. In such situations, individuals usually focus on their internal and external states to assess how they behave toward certain objects, such as a place, person, or thing (Hogg & Cooper, 2007) . A different way in which behavior impacts attitude entails where individuals might treat certain individuals with ridicule or disdain, which depicts their attitude toward them. In this perspective, the behavior of an individual is usually conducive to either the attitude a person has toward a circumstance, person, or situation (Irimia, 2010) . Here, a person ends up reacting to a certain situation, thus behaving in a reactive manner toward the thing or place.
Functions of Attitude
Attitude serves several functions. The first function is a utilitarian one whereby attitudes usually support people’s basic survival in simplistic terms, such as through punishments and rewards. For instance, a negative attitude directed toward dark forests serves as a safety measure since something bad might take part in such areas (Castelli & Carraro, 2011) . When individuals have positive attitude toward the work they undertake, they are able to get along well with their colleagues, improve social and economic situations, and realize improved life quality. The second function served by attitude entails knowledge development. Attitude development in this case assists individuals to make sense, assess cause and effect, and comprehend the day-to-day occurrences (Hogg & Cooper, 2007) . For the knowledge function, it relates to object appraisal directly, stating that the most vivid attitudes function entails object appraisal, which matches people’s social motive that relates to understanding. Thus, people have the option of deciding the approach that they should take or avoid. The third function of attitude is a heuristics one (Albarracin & Handley, 2011) . The heuristics function assists in automaticity and deal with psychological stress, hence making sophisticated decisions and judgments possible.
Impact of Attitudes on Behavior
From my perspective, I believe that attitudes have minor impact toward the behavior of individuals. For instance, assumptions usually prevail that individuals behave based on the influence of their attitudes, even though actual behavior and attitudes are not aligned in a perfect manner. For example, during political campaigns, individuals might show overwhelming support for a certain candidate, but fail to vote. In other instances, it is possible for individuals to alter their attitudes to ensure that they match with their behaviors. Additionally, when looking at the cognitive dissonance phenomena, individuals might encounter psychological distress because of conflicting beliefs or thoughts. To allow them avoid the tension, they might consider altering their attitudes to reflect their real behaviors or other beliefs (Albarracin & Handley, 2011) . Hence, it is possible to alter attitudes in such a manner that they do not reflect behavior, indicating that attitude lacks major influence on behavior.
References
Albarracin, D., & Handley, I. M. (2011). The time for doing is not the time for change: Effects of general action and inaction goals on attitude retrieval and attitude change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100 (6), 983–998.
Castelli, L., & Carraro, L. (2011). Ideology is related to basic cognitive processes involved in attitude formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 (5), 1013–1016.
Hogg, M. A., & Cooper, J. M. (2007). The Sage handbook of social psychology. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Irimia, C. (2010). Empathy as a source of attitude change. Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice, 2 (2), 319–324.
