The definition of attitude that we have included here is adapted from Steers & Porter (1991). Obviously, different authors define attitudes in different ways. Saal & Knight (1988) define attitudes as "relatively stable affective, or evaluative, dispositions toward a specific person, situation or other entity."
Fishbein (1967) defines attitude thusly: "an attitude is characterized as a learned implicit response that varies in intensity and tends to guide (mediate) an individual's overt responses to an object." In Fishbein's conceptualization, attitude refers only to the evaluation of a concept and there is a mediating evaluative response to every stimulus. Consequently, according to Fishbein, people have attitudes toward all objects, which may be positive, negative, or neutral.