How Attitude Roles in Decision Making Essay

Before I can talk about the play role between attitude and buying decision process, let’s look at the definition of attitude first. Attitude is a relationship link between feeling and believes or a consumer’s thoughts and the response action. We can say that attitude is something that is in the people’s mind and the thought of a consumer’s openness towards the information received by each individual. The information received can be both positive and negative. As we can all see that attitude comprise of consumer’s thought which has an effect on the feeling and that feeling will express through the consumer’s acting. Now let’s see what it is means by decision making process. It is a process of choosing one or another way from all of the alternatives that a consumer has considered with. Normally, the final decision making would be the best and the most suitable alternative which helps consumer reaches their objective. Attitude is the important internal factor that shapes an individual choice. In addition, there are three factors that will lead to consumer’s behavior, which are predisposing factors, enabling factors and reinforcing factors. Predisposing factors comprise of knowledge, beliefs, values, cultures and, of course, attitude, which I will focus on. Moreover, attitude can be form by many ways. It may be through the learning process, the ability to distinguish the differences (which one is good or bad), imitate from others and experienced for each individual. These three factors influence a consumer’s behavior and it also effect the decision making of that particular consumer. For example, consumer has experienced that the expensive things always come together with the better quality products. And he believed in what is actually has happened to him in the past, called the cognitive component. So whenever he recognized the problem, like he want to buy a new bag (an opportunity recognition) and try to search for all the alternatives he is willing to buy or interested in, you will find out that all the alternatives are all the brand name bags with the high price. In another situation, a consumer may imitate an attitude of â€Å"being fat means ugly† from friends and society around her. So it may leads to the decision making by she is starting to recognize the problem by thinking that she is too fat and will classify herself as ugly person, called an affective component. Then what she will try to do next is the information search, both internal and external, about how she can reduce her weight and so on. So you can see that an attitude of a consumer, even though it comes from your society around you, can influence an individual’s decision making process easily. The function of attitudes may also role in the decision making process because it helps consumes to cope with their environments. One of the five functional theories of attitudes is social-adjustment function, which is a function occur when a society make an adjustment about something and it leads an individual consumer to develop the attitude toward it. For example, nowadays people are more concerned about the environmental in our society