Attitudes without Objects

[daverupa]

Here is the abstract for the paper Attitudes without Objects: Evidence for a Dispositional Attitude, its Measurement, and its Consequences:

We hypothesized that individuals may differ in the dispositional tendency to have positive versus negative attitudes, a trait termed the Dispositional Attitude. Across
four studies, we developed a 16-item Dispositional Attitude Measure (DAM) and investigated its internal consistency, test-retest reliability, factor structure, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and predictive validity. DAM scores were (a) positively correlated with positive affect traits, curiosity-related traits, and individual pre-existing attitudes, (b) negatively correlated with negative affect traits, and (c) uncorrelated with theoretically unrelated traits. Dispositional attitudes also significantly predicted the valence of novel attitudes while controlling for theoretically relevant traits (such as the big-five and optimism). The dispositional attitude construct represents a new perspective in which attitudes are not simply a function of the properties of the stimuli under consideration, but are also a function of the properties of the evaluator. We discuss the intriguing implications of dispositional attitudes for many areas of research, including attitude formation, persuasion, and behavior prediction.

For what it's worth; I was somewhat surprised that this was a new perspective...

[retrofuturist]

Greetings,

For what it's worth; I was somewhat surprised that this was a new perspective...

Metta,
Retro.

[chownah]

The author is a doctoral candidate at a major uni. For science to study ideas they must (usually) be quantifiable. I think the author is attempting to quantify something that is usually thought of as common sense which may seem pointless to us but is of greater importance for the field of science overall. Things that can be quantized can be elaborated on....things that have not been quantized are either ignored or become a focus of attempts to quantize. Also, in general I think that the author is into studying attitudes (I could be mistaken on this) and attitudes are things we all think we know about (even if we really don't) so his work seems trivial to us.
chownah

[Dan74]

I will ask my psychologist friend, but I really doubt this is new. More likely this is an old saw in a new garb, which is so common in all areas of science.

[chownah]

To find out how new this research is or if it is just a refinement of older work a good place to start is to look into the reference list given at the end of the article, then you will get an idea about what related work there is on the topic which predates this work....of course there could have been related work the author chose to ignore.....another good place to look is a key word search of the key words the author gives.....and of course as has been suggested asking someone who works in the field is good too.
chownah

[daverupa]

I feel as though something I've written is being taken as a denigration; since the paper reiterated the newness of the position in the conclusion, I thought it would be interesting to note that this was something which seems accounted for in the Dhamma as well as in folk psychology, while here it is only just now(-ish) an approach to understanding being implemented by a scientific methodology.

So, I apologize for any 'tone', and I thank everyone for their efforts to fill in blanks.