People with Positive Dispositional Attitude Have a Strong Tendency to Like Things

A new study tries to solve the mystery behind people's likes and dislikes.

According to the new study, researchers have identified the personality trait that is responsible for this attitude. Researchers say that  an individual's 'dispositional attitude' controls his or her likes or dislikes.

People that have a positive dispositional attitude display a strong tendency to like things around them; on the other hand, people that carry a negative dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to dislike things.

The study "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," the authors said in a press release.

They also state that there exists one critical factor that is common in an individual's attitude i.e. the individual that forms the attitude. "Some people may simply be more prone to focusing on positive features and others on negative features," Hepler said. 

 The researchers created a scale in order to discover whether people are different when it comes to the tendency to like or dislike something.  The participants were asked to report their attitude toward various stimuli such as cold showers, politics, soccer and architecture.

The participants' responses were averaged together based on how much people liked and disliked the stimuli, to calculate their dispositional attitude.

According to the study report, the theory is that if people tend to differ on their likes and dislikes then their attitude for independent objects may be related.

The researchers noticed that people with positive dispositional attitude were more open when compared to people with negative dispositional attitude. People with positive dispositional attitude tend to purchase new stuff, receive vaccine shots etc.

"This surprising and novel discovery expands attitude theory by demonstrating that an attitude is not simply a function of an object's properties, but it is also a function of the properties of the individual who evaluates the object," concluded Hepler and Albarracín.

The study was documented in the journal of Personality and Social Psychology.