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Attitude and Social Cognition is Chapter 6 of the NCERT Class 12 psychology textbook, pages 104 to 119 in the current 2026-27 reprint. Its seven review questions draw on five ideas: what an attitude is, how it forms, how it changes, how it relates to behaviour, and prejudice.
What is an attitude and what are its components?
NCERT defines an attitude as a state of the mind, a set of views or thoughts about a topic (the “attitude object”), with an evaluative feature that is positive, negative or neutral (NCERT Chapter 6). Together, its three parts are called the A-B-C components:
Affective (A): the feeling, such as sadness and anger when trees are cut down.
Behavioural (B), also called conative: the tendency to act, such as joining a tree-plantation campaign.
Cognitive (C): the thought, such as a positive view of a “green environment” based on what you know about it.
The three need not be equally strong. Attitudes also have four features: valence (positive or negative), extremeness (how strongly so), simplicity or complexity (how many member attitudes sit inside it) and centrality (how much it influences the others).
How are attitudes formed and changed?
Attitudes are learned through association, reward and punishment, modelling, group or cultural norms, and exposure to information. Family and school, reference groups, personal experience and the media shape them (NCERT Chapter 6). The chapter gives three concepts of change:
Balance (Fritz Heider): a P-O-X triangle links a person (P), another person (O) and the attitude object (X). Imbalance is uncomfortable, so one relationship changes.
Cognitive dissonance (Leon Festinger): two cognitions that clash (“Pan masala causes mouth cancer which is fatal” and “I eat pan masala”) push you to change one of them.
Two-step concept (S.M. Mohsin, an Indian psychologist): first the target identifies with the source, and the regard becomes mutual. Then the source changes their own behaviour, and the target imitates it.
Worked example: is this triangle balanced? In NCERT's dowry example, P favours dowry (P-X +), O likes P (O-P +), and O opposes dowry (O-X −). A triangle is balanced when all three sides are positive, or when two are negative and one is positive. This one has two positives and a negative, so one side must change: P starts disliking dowry, O starts liking it, or O starts disliking P.
The chapter's dissonance box comes from a 1959 experiment. Students spent an hour on dull tasks and were then paid $1 or $20 to tell a waiting student, secretly working with the experimenters, that the tasks were enjoyable. On a scale from −5 to +5, the $1 group later rated the tasks +1.35, the $20 group −0.05 and an unpaid control group −0.45 (Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959). A dollar was too little to explain the lie away, so the $1 group changed their attitude instead.
Behaviour does not always follow attitude either. In LaPiere's study, described in the chapter, a Chinese couple was refused service only once on their travels, yet when he later sent questionnaires to hotels in the same areas, a very large percentage said they would not accommodate Chinese guests.
What causes prejudice, and how can it be reduced?
Prejudice is an attitude towards a group, usually negative. A stereotype is its cognitive component, and discrimination is its behavioural component. Prejudice can exist without discrimination, and discrimination without prejudice (NCERT Chapter 6). The chapter names five sources: learning, a strong social identity with ingroup bias, scapegoating, the “kernel of truth” belief, and the self-fulfilling prophecy. To see why a few examples can feel like proof, read our explainer on confirmation bias and the 2-4-6 task.
The chapter's three remedies are education, intergroup contact (cooperative, close and between equals) and stressing individual over group identity. A meta-analysis of 713 samples from 515 studies found that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006). The same review found that Allport's optimal conditions made the reduction larger, but they were not essential for it.
Is attribution still in Class 12 psychology?
Not in the current NCERT chapter. The 2026-27 reprint has no section on attribution or impression formation, and neither topic is in its key terms, although page 115 still points to a “section on social cognition”. A guide that teaches those topics here may be following an older edition. Ask your teacher which syllabus your exam follows.
A one-hour revision plan for this chapter
10 minutes, question 1: define attitude and list A, B and C for an attitude of your own.
10 minutes, questions 2 and 3: the learning processes and factors, each with an Indian example.
15 minutes, question 4: draw the dowry triangle from memory, then explain LaPiere and the $1 result.
10 minutes, questions 5 and 6: prejudice versus stereotype, and prejudice without discrimination.
15 minutes, question 7 (the junk-food friend): use the two-step concept, a credible source and a message with just enough information.
If psychology shares your timetable with physics, chemistry or biology, Fermi's AI tutor can work out what you already know in those subjects and build a plan for each session. Parents weighing the subject for a younger child can read whether to take psychology in Class 11.
