Attitudes are defined as our favourable or unfavourable evaluations of people, objects, and situations.  We communicate our attitudes in the form of statements such as: “I like mangoes”, “I enjoy classical music”, or “I do not enjoy rock music”. When we use words such as ‘like’, ‘dislike’, ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ we are describing our attitude towards objects, people or issues. Attitude consists of three aspects i.e. cognitive, affective and behavioural:

(i) Cognitive part: It refers to the thinking that brings about the development of a belief about the attitude object.

(ii) Affective part: It refers to the direction (positive or negative feeling), intensity of a person’s evaluation or the emotion experienced towards the attitude object.

(iii) Behavioural part: It is the likelihood of acting in a certain manner towards the attitude object.

These three components, thinking, feeling and behaving, come together and we form an attitude towards a person or an object. At times these components may be inconsistent. Thus you may hold a positive attitude towards a neighbour – he is intelligent and hardworking (positive qualities) – but you may not like his/her manners. Or you may not like your neighbour but you may still help him/her when the situation demands. Both the possibilities are likely to occur. Normally if you hold a strong attitude, all the three components of attitude remain consistent and do not contradict each other. 

For example, if a well known cricketer, like Sachin Tendulkar, is visiting your neighbourhood and you are extremely fond (feeling) of playing and watching cricket, then you will actively plan (thinking process), and visit the venue (behaviour). Or, you may find Sachin Tendulkar to be an excellent cricket player (thinking part), yet are not a keen player yourself nor do you watch the game of cricket regularly (low liking emotional experience) and hence may decide

not to put in the effort to meet him (low probability of behaviour).