14 DAY TRIAL // Specialists writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology claim to have figured out why some people seem unable to stop themselves from badmouthing everything.
Otherwise put, they argue that they have pinned down the personality dimension that needs be held accountable for the fact that, as popular wisdom puts it, hater gonna hate.
As explained on the website for the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, the personality dimension that makes people “haters” has been dubbed by the specialists who identified it “dispositional attitude.”
By the looks of it, dispositional attitude can be either positive, or negative.
Those who happen to have a positive dispositional attitude display a strong tendency to like things and people. Those who have a negative one more often than not dislike everything around them.
Specialists explain that a person's dispositional attitude dictates how they feel about things and other people regardless of what external stimuli they receive.
More precisely, it compels an individual to have a certain attitude towards the world around them that is independent of the stimuli sent their way.
“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 researchers reportedly write in their paper.
“Some people may simply be more prone to focusing on positive features and others on negative features,” specialist Justin Hepler at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign further details.
Interestingly enough, the researchers have also found that, most of the time, people who have a positive dispositional attitude are more likely to recycle, drive carefully, get vaccine shots and buy new products.
“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,” researchers Justin Hepler and Dolores Albarracín comment on the importance of this study.
“Overall, the present research provides clear support for the dispositional attitude as a meaningful construct that has important implications for attitude theory and research,” they add.