Cognitive component - what is it?

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Attitude (or attitude) is a generalized tendency to think or act in a certain way towards an object or situation, often accompanied by a feeling. The cognitive component is part of the attitude. This is a logical predisposition to respond consistently to a given object.

The essence of the concept

The cognitive component may include evaluations of people, problems, objects, or events. Such estimates are often positive or negative, but sometimes they can also be vague. However, unlike other components of the attitude, the formation of the cognitive component presupposes the presence of logical factors. What then are the other elements of the attitude or relationship?

What is a relationship and what does it consist of

Attitude is a way of thinking, and it determines how we relate to the world. Researchers also speculate that there are several different components that form it.

This can be seen by looking at the three components of a relationship:cognition, affect and behavior.

So, we can list these three elements with full confidence in their original form:

• cognitive component;
• affective component;
• behavioral component.

Features of the term

The relationship component described in this article refers to the beliefs, thoughts, and attributes that we associate with an object. The cognitive component is a segment of opinions or beliefs. It refers to that part of the relationship that has to do with the person's general knowledge.

It is usually found in general terms or stereotypes such as "all kids are cute", "smoking is bad for he alth", etc.

Affective component

The affective component is the emotional or feeling segment of the relationship.

This is related to a statement that affects another person.

It deals with feelings or emotions that surface on the surface of impressions of something, such as fear or hatred. Using the example above, one might think that he loves all children because they are cute, or hates smoking because it is unhe althy.

The affect element in behavior consists of a person's tendency to behave in a certain way towards an object. It refers to that part of an attitude that reflects the person's intention in the short or long term.

Using the example above, a behavioral attitude can be expressed in phrases like "I can't wait tokiss the baby" or "we'd better keep those smokers out of the library", etc.

Differences

As mentioned earlier, any relationship has three components, which include a cognitive component, an affective component, or an emotional component. Also behavioral. Essentially, the cognitive component is based on information or knowledge, while the affective component is based on feelings.

The behavioral component reflects how attitudes affect how we act or behave. This helps to understand their complexity and the potential relationship between attitudes and behaviors.

But for the sake of clarity, keep in mind that the term "relationship" essentially refers to the affected part of the three components.

Meaning and importance

In an organization, attitude is important to achieving a common goal or objective. Each of these components is very different from the other, and they can build on each other to shape our views and therefore influence how we experience the world.

History

It has long been assumed that attitudes have affective, behavioral, and cognitive components. Two hypotheses were derived from this assumption and tested in three correlation studies. Individuals have been shown to show greater consistency in response to attitude scales measuring the same item than to scales measuring different components.

To test this hypothesis, Campbell and Fiske's multiprocessor matrix (1959) was used. Secondly, a hypothesis was put forwardthat the correspondence between verbal attitude scales and non-verbal behavioral responses should be highest when both are drawn from the same attitude component. Explicit behavior measures were compared with verbal measures of the affective, behavioral, and cognitive components as a criterion for the second hypothesis.

Construction of verbal measures for the three components required the development of a procedure for estimating the amount that each verbal statement reflected in each component. Attitude scales for the church were prepared using equal interval, summary grade, scalogram analysis, and self-assessment methods. Both hypotheses were confirmed, but the dominant feature was the high cross-correlation between the three components, with the uniqueness of each component introducing very little additional variance.

Another name

The names of the cognitive, emotional and behavioral components usually do not change. However, the first is often called informational. The information component consists of a system of beliefs, ideas, values and stereotypes of a person about the objects of relation. In other words, it refers to the person's ideas about the subject.

Influencing opinion

The term "opinion" is often used as a substitute for the cognitive component of an attitude, especially when it relates to an issue.

For example, a job seeker may find out from his sources and from other employees working in the company that in a particularthe company has very favorable chances for promotion. In reality, this may or may not be correct. However, the information a person uses is the key to how they feel about this job and this company. That person's beliefs, perceptions, values, and stereotypes about the company together make up the cognitive component that influences the person's attitude towards something.

Associated with affectivity

The affective component of social attitude refers to the emotional aspect of attitude, which is very often a deeply rooted element of behavior and most resistant to change. If there are cognitive connections, you can combine the two elements and highlight a single cognitive-emotional component.

In simple terms, this includes the emotions felt towards the object of the relationship, say love or hate, as well as dislike, pleasant or unpleasant things. The emotional component, if strong enough, usually stands in the way of changing attitudes. This component can be explained by this statement: “I like this job and therefore I will take it.”

Behavioral component

The behavioral component of a social relationship indicates a tendency to respond to the object of the relationship in a certain way. They compensate for the partial insufficiency of the cognitive component.

In other words, it is a predisposition to act in a certain way in relation to the object of the relation. It becomes known, if you observe the behavior of a person, theneat behind what he says, what he will do or how he behaves, does or reacts.

For example, the person concerned in the above case may decide to take a job because of good future prospects.

Of the three components of an attitude, only the behavioral component can be directly observed. You cannot observe the other two components of attitude: beliefs (cognitive component) and feelings (affective component).

Relationship

There is an internal and interconnected organization of the components of a relation. The above three components are interconnected and uniformly form our attitude. A change in one component may result in a change in others in order to maintain internal consistency in the overall structure of the relationship.

Research

Research on attitude as a phenomenon has often focused specifically on the cognitive component. Current thinking about childhood pathology emphasizes the need to consider psychopathology from a developmental perspective. Cicchetti and Schneider-Rosen, for example, argue that psychopathology in children must be viewed in terms of a failure to agree on important tasks of social-cognitive competence in the developmental sequence of childhood. Mastery of stage tasks is seen as a mechanism by which children move to new levels of cognitive organization and differentiation.

Cognitive reorganization is seen as the process by whichprevious levels of organization are included in the new hierarchies of the cognitive structure. Thus, the failure to agree on one developmental task is relevant to the mastery of subsequent stages and, therefore, the consequences for subsequent social-cognitive competence in adult life. The cognitive component, the behavioral component - components of this kind play a very large role in all social processes, which has been repeatedly confirmed by many studies.

Difficulties and further research

Interpersonal cognitive complexity is one of the psychological constructs people use to describe others. A psychological construct, such as being friendly, differs from a physical construct used to describe someone, such as being bald, and from a behavioral construct, such as eating slowly. People who use more psychological constructs to describe others are said to have a more differentiated perception of others.

More than 30 years of research in the communication literature confirms the relationship between interpersonal cognitive complexity, as measured by the Role Category Questionnaire (RCQ; Crockett, 1965), and person-centered communication skills (Burleson & Caplan, 1998). People with higher levels of interpersonal cognitive complexity are more able to understand the views of others, show more empathy, make more situational explanations, and can generate more potential explanations for the behavior of others (Burleson & Caplan).

Today inthe study included daycare workers, nurses, police officers, and organizational leaders (Burleson &Caplan; Kasch, Kasch & Lisnek, 1987; Sypher & Zorn, 1986). One of the goals in this study was to assess the range of interpersonal cognitive difficulties in a population of CNA students.

The second goal was to test the predictive validity of the RCQ. The RCQ involves asking people to describe others they know. One might expect that perceivers who used a relatively large number of constructions to describe the people they knew would also use a relatively large number of constructions to describe the people to whom they had just been introduced. The cognitive component is those very mental constructions.

It was also interesting if CNAs, who find the Resident more likeable, would use more psychological constructs to describe him. A common finding in the RCQ literature is that people use more constructs to describe likes and dislikes of others (Crockett, 1965).

It's likely that if an audience likes someone featured in a video, that audience will follow that person's information more closely. This study looked at the relationship between human behavior and the number of constructs that CNA students used to describe. The development of the cognitive component of the attitude played a big role in this matter.