What an Attitude Actually Is: Feeling, Action and Belief

Values tell you what a person believes in. An attitude tells you what that person is likely to do at four in the afternoon, on the ninth file of the day, with a petitioner still waiting outside. This part sets out what an attitude actually is, and the three parts it is made of.

Attitude is the point at which GS Paper IV stops being abstract. The syllabus places it directly after values and ethics, and the sequence is deliberate: values tell you what a person holds, while an attitude tells you how that holding is likely to appear when a file, a petitioner or a crowd is in front of the person. Every applied question in this area — bureaucratic and democratic attitudes, moral attitudes, attitude change, persuasion — rests on a definition and an internal structure that has to be secure first.

It is worth being clear about why the examiner asks at all. UPSC is not testing whether you have read a psychology textbook; it is testing whether you can look at a piece of official conduct and say what is producing it — a feeling, a belief, or a settled habit of action — because that diagnosis is what makes correction possible. A candidate who treats attitude as another word for behaviour has nothing left to write when the paper asks how attitudes are formed or changed.

A settled disposition, and the object it settles on

An attitude is a settled disposition to like or dislike something — a person, an object, an issue, a behaviour, an event. Both words do work. Settled means it persists across occasions rather than flaring once: irritation at a rude clerk on a bad morning is a mood, a standing readiness to be irritated by clerks is an attitude. Disposition means a readiness to respond rather than the response itself. Attitudes are built rather than inherited, assembled out of experience, belief and emotion, and out of watching how others behave.

Every attitude points at something, and that something is the attitude object. Naming it precisely is the first discipline this topic demands. To say that an officer has a poor attitude conveys almost nothing; to say that he is dismissive towards applicants who cannot fill in their own forms can be examined, because the object is fixed and one can ask which part of the disposition produces the dismissal. Attitudes matter, finally, because they are among the best available predictors of behaviour, and because the stability that lets a person move through a crowded social world without deciding everything afresh is the same stability that makes attitudes slow to yield to new information.

Attitude, opinion, belief, value and prejudice: five words that are not interchangeable

Candidates lose marks here more often than anywhere else in the topic. An opinion is a judgement a person can state and will often revise once better information arrives; it is largely a matter of thought and sits lightly. A belief is a proposition held to be true — that night-duty rosters in the district are unfairly drawn, for instance — and may be held with no particular feeling attached. An attitude is what results when evaluation and feeling fasten on to a belief and incline the person towards a line of conduct.

A value works at a different level altogether. Integrity, compassion and impartiality are general standards rather than stances towards particular things, and they sit above attitudes rather than beside them: a single commitment to impartiality generates a whole family of attitudes, towards queue-jumping, towards recommendations, towards the relative who telephones about a tender. The test is easy to apply under examination pressure — ask what the thing is directed at, and if the honest answer is nothing in particular, it is a value.

A prejudice is not a separate category at all. It is an attitude directed at a group, formed before any real acquaintance with its members and maintained afterwards regardless of them. Its distinguishing feature is that it survives evidence which ought to disturb it: exceptions are treated as exceptions rather than as reasons to revise. Writing prejudice as a species of attitude is what allows an answer to add something useful — the instruments that change attitudes are the ones available against prejudice too.

The ABC model: three components of a single disposition

Psychologists ordinarily break an attitude into three parts, organised around the attitude object. The scheme is the ABC model, after the affective, behavioural and cognitive components: how we feel about the object, what we do about it, and how we think about it. These are three faces of one disposition rather than three separate dispositions sitting side by side, and in most people they agree closely enough for the attitude to appear seamless.

The affective component is feeling — the emotional reaction the attitude object stirs in us, such as the pride and warmth a committed supporter feels towards a political party, or the flash of fear at the mere thought of a snake. It is usually the least articulate part of an attitude and the most stubborn, because a person can be argued out of a reason far more easily than out of a revulsion.

The cognitive component is belief: what we know or think about the object. The conviction that yoga is good for one’s health is cognitive, and so is the belief that snakes are dangerous because some of them are venomous. This component need not be accurate; it needs only to be held, which is why demonstrably false beliefs can support perfectly stable attitudes.

The behavioural component is action and intention — the way an attitude shapes what a person does, such as avoiding a park known to be full of snakes. Attitudes predict behaviour best under three conditions: when the person is aware of the attitude, when it is relevant to the situation, and when nothing external is pushing against it. Those conditions explain why someone with genuinely egalitarian attitudes may still sit silently through a casteist remark at a family gathering.

Where the three components surface in an officer’s working day

The model earns its place in this paper only when applied, and ordinary administration supplies the material. A file noting is where the cognitive component becomes visible in writing. Two officers may reject the same application, yet a note recording only that the claim is inadmissible reveals a different structure of belief from one that states what the rule prevents and asks whether relief lies under some other head.

A grievance hearing exposes the affective component to the one person least able to do anything about it. Whether the officer looks up, whether the petitioner is allowed to finish a sentence, whether the third case of the morning receives the attention given to the first — the petitioner reads the feeling long before the order arrives.

A field visit is behaviour, and behaviour is the only component the public can observe directly: which school is inspected, the failing one or the one easy to reach; whether the officer stays for the mid-day meal; whether the route is settled by the office or by him. This visibility explains why administrative reform almost always attacks the behavioural component first, through attendance systems, disposal timelines and compulsory field days, in the hope that feeling and belief will follow conduct.

Chak De! India: the three components moving together

The clearest popular illustration of the model in motion is the 2007 film Chak De! India, in which Shah Rukh Khan plays Kabir Khan, a disgraced former hockey player who takes charge of the Indian women’s hockey team and coaches them to glory. His attitude towards the team, the game and his own country transforms across the film along all three components rather than one.

His feeling begins bound up with hurt and anger, having been wrongly accused of betraying the nation in a crucial match; that bitterness gives way slowly to hope and resolve as he takes on the women’s team and senses a chance to prove his integrity and win back his honour. His behaviour begins cold and exacting — strict and distant, run on the conviction that only hard discipline will make the team succeed — and softens, as the players bond and improve, into something supportive, encouraging them to take pride in themselves and in their country.

His beliefs begin narrow: discipline, strategy and teamwork win matches, and coaching this team is his one chance at redemption. His thinking then deepens. He comes to see that winning turns as much on the players’ emotional and psychological strength as on their skill, and works deliberately to make them believe in themselves and in one another. By the end the three are aligned — his hope and determination, his supportive coaching, and his belief in unity and mental strength — and the team wins the World Cup as he recovers his honour and self-respect.

For an answer, the value of the example lies in the sequence rather than the story. No component moved on its own: the change in belief made a different kind of coaching available, the new conduct produced a different feeling, and the feeling then held the new belief in place. That is the ABC model in motion — feeling, behaviour and belief shifting together to change what a person does, and what he is finally able to achieve.

What the examiner is actually testing

Very few questions ask for the definition alone; it is worth two or three marks at the head of a larger answer, and the rest lie in what is done with it: naming the attitude object before analysing anything, identifying which component drives the conduct under discussion, and remembering that attitudes are learned and therefore changeable — the assumption on which every recommendation about training, transparency and administrative reform rests. Definition first, object second, component third, and only then the argument.