S.O.T.T: New research has uncovered the reason why some people seem to dislike everything while others seem to like everything. Apparently, it's all part of our individual personality - a dimension that researchers have coined "dispositional attitude." People with a positive dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to like things, whereas people with a negative dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to dislike things, according to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The journal article, "Attitudes without objects: Evidence for a dispositional attitude, its measurement, and its consequences," was written by Justin Hepler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Dolores Albarracín, Ph.D., the Martin Fishbein Chair of Communication and Professor of Psychology at Penn.
"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," wrote the authors. "[For example], at first glance, it may not seem useful to know someone's feelings about architecture when assessing their feelings about health care. After all, health care and architecture are independent stimuli with unique sets of properties, so attitudes toward these objects should also be independent."
However, they note, there is still one critical factor that an individual's attitudes will have in common: the individual who formed the attitudes. "Some people may simply be more prone to focusing on positive features and others on negative features," Hepler said... read more>>>...
