The development of social attitudes and personal values.

Abstract

Attitudes and values are mediational states within the individual that predispose him toward certain courses of action and toward certain beliefs and evaluations.* These predispositions are highly generalized and thereby serve as economical guides to behavior when the individual is confronted with alternative modes of response, the selection of conflicting goals, or the choice of different instrumental actions for arriving at a given goal. Social attitudes and personal values permit the individual a high degree of consistency in his behavior. They favor human economy by promoting easier decisions that have a high probability of being consistent with previous ones. This economy is of course antithetical to reflection on special features of the individual case. Prejudice and inflexibility are therefore natural concomitants of the same mediational processes that sustain the socially desirable attitudes and the enduring human values. Some attitudes and values we would like to transmit to our children, others that mirror our own prejudices and biases we would like to spare them. The Development of Social AttitudesAn attitude is a theoretical concept that "denotes a functional state of readiness which determines the organism to react in a characteristic way to certain stimuli or stimulus situations" (104). Social attitudes are response tendencies toward other people or identifiable groups of people. "1 can't stand to sit near a Negro," "I wouldn't want to associate with a Catholic," "I don't like Protestants or Jews," "I get the 'creeps' whenever I'm near ' Although psychological theorists are generally agreed that the majority of man' s social attitudes and personal values are learned during the acculturation process, they have applied a variety of labels to the supporting mediational states, e.g., habits, beliefvalue matrices, perceptual organizations. 514 * See Meier (81) for an extensive treatment of the functions of art in human experience.