What Is an Attitude?
Do you remember the last great party you attended? What did you talk about? Who did you talk about? Chances are you talked about things and people that you like or dislike. You might have expressed the view that you disliked your countryâs President or Prime Minister, had mixed feelings about the latest Meryl Streep film, or that you really liked your social psychology class. In every case, you were talking about your attitudes â your likes and dislikes. Attitudes are important. They influence how we view the world, what we think, and what we do. Even from an early age, our attitudes are vital because they help us understand what we like (and should approach) and what we dislike (and should avoid). Because attitudes are vital in understanding human thought and behavior, social psychologists have devoted a lot of attention to understanding how we form attitudes, how our attitudes influence our daily life, and how our attitudes change over time. In this book, we want to tell you about what social psychologists call an attitude.
In thinking about these questions, it makes sense to start by defining the term attitude. Like most constructs in psychology, the attitude concept has been defined in many ways. In their influential text The Psychology of Attitudes, Alice Eagly and Shelly Chaiken (1993, p. 1) define attitude as âa psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.â Russell Fazio (1995, p. 247) defines attitude as âan association in memory between a given object and a given summary evaluation of the object.â Richard Petty and John Cacioppo (1981, p. 7) define attitude as âa general and enduring positive or negative feeling about some person, object, or issue.â Finally, Mark Zanna and John Rempel (1988, p. 319) define attitude as âthe categorization of a stimulus object along an evaluative dimension.â
Notice that all of these definitions emphasize evaluative judgments about an object. Indeed, most attitude theorists would argue that evaluation is the predominant aspect of the attitude concept (see Eagly & Chaiken, 2007). In other words, reporting an attitude involves making a decision of liking versus disliking, or favoring versus disfavoring a particular issue, object, or person. As such, our attitudes serve to summarize different types of thoughts, feelings, and behavioral experiences we associate with an issue, object, or person. As we will see in Chapter 2, thoughts, feelings, and past behaviors are important sources of information for attitudes. Thus, we define attitude as an overall evaluation of an object that is based on cognitive, affective, and behavioral information.
An attitude, when conceptualized as an evaluative judgment, can vary in two important ways (see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, 1998). First, attitudes differ in valence, or positive versus negative direction of evaluation. For instance, the three authors of this text hold some positive attitudes (we all like the music of The Police), negative attitudes (two of the three authors dislike liver), and neutral attitudes (at least one author feels average toward tomato juice). Second, attitudes differ in strength, which is a term encompassing their stability over time, ability to withstand persuasive appeals, capacity to influence how we process information, and ability to guide behavior (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995). For example, while one of us really hates liver, the other feels less strongly negative. While valence is the defining characteristic of an attitude, throughout the book (and especially in Chapter 4), we will see that differences both in valence and strength play an important role in understanding how attitudes guide our processing of information and our behavior.
Until now, we have used a number of objects when providing examples of our own attitudes. This leads to the question âWhat is an attitude object?â Basically, attitude objects can be anything that is evaluated along a dimension of favorability. As others have noted (see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993), some attitude objects are abstract (e.g., liberalism) and others are concrete (e.g., a red Ferrari car). Other individuals (e.g., a particular politician) can serve as attitude objects, as can social policy issues (e.g., death penalty) and social groups (e.g., people from Canada). And last but not least, we have attitudes toward ourself (e.g., self-esteem). Throughout the book, we will use a number of examples when describing research that social psychologists have carried out on the attitude concept.
Key Points
- An attitude is an evaluative judgment about a stimulus object.
- Attitudes differ in valence and strength.
- Attitude objects can be anything that is liked or disliked.
A Short History of Attitude Research
The study of attitudes has an extensive history within social psychology, with both emerging at the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, Gordon Allport (1935, p. 198), a renowned researcher who helped inspire attitude research, famously noted that âthe concept of attitude is probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology.â This view was also shared by experts worldwide and outside of social psychology, such as sociologists and behavioral psychologists (see McGuire, 1986). In this section of the chapter, we consider why social psychologists first started to study attitudes, and why this fascination has continued. Our aim is to highlight the central role that the study of attitudes has played, and continues to play, within social psychology. To achieve this aim, we will time-travel backwards, but, for the sake of brevity, we only present a short history â one that is more like an episode of Dr Who than a feature-length documentary. Readers who are interested in learning more are invited to read the work of William McGuire (e.g., McGuire, 1985, 1986), as well as Briñol and Petty (2012), who have produced detailed reviews on the history of attitude research.
A Starting Point
As noted above, empirical research relevant to the psychology of attitudes can be traced to the early 20th century. In the 1920s, a number of scientists became interested in measuring subjective mental properties like attitudes. At that time, such was the importance of work on attitude measurement that social psychology was often defined as the study of attitudes (McGuire, 1985). Two significant researchers from that era were Louis Thurstone and Rensis Likert. Thurstone and Likert developed various ways for measuring attitudes, most notably the Equal Appearing Interval method (Thurstone, 1928; Thurstone & Chave, 1929) and the Likert scale (see Likert, 1932). Thurstoneâs and Likertâs research was influential because it demonstrated that attitudes can be quantifiably measured â paving the way for the development of the discipline. Indeed, the ability of scientists to measure attitudes was seen as an enormous breakthrough, as evidenced by the title of one of Thurstoneâs first journal articles on this topic: âAttitudes can be measured.â Even today, Likert scales remain an important tool for assessing attitudes and opinions. We will learn about Thurstoneâs and Likertâs contributions later in this chapter.
In addition to developing strategies to measure attitudes, early research also considered the degree to which individualsâ attitudes influence their behavior. In a famous paper, Richard LaPiere (1934) reported his experience traveling across the United States of America with a young Chinese couple. At the time of their travels, there was widespread anti-Asian prejudice in the United States. As a result of this prejudice, LaPiere was concerned whether he and his traveling companions would be refused service in hotels and restaurants. Much to his surprise, only once (in over 250 establishments) were they not served. A few months after the completion of the journey, LaPiere sent a letter to each of the visited establishments and asked whether they would serve Chinese visitors. Of the establishments that replied, only one indicated that it would serve them, implying that there can be a gap between attitudes and behavior. While there were a number of problems with this work (e.g., the measures of attitude and behavior are not suitable by modern standards; LaPiere himself was critical about the utility of verbal questionnaires, see Chapter 3), the study was seminal in its consideration of whether attitudes predict behavior. The study of when and how attitudes guide behavior (and how behavior influences attitudes) remains at the forefront of attitude research. Indeed, we devote an entire section of this book to this issue.
The Real World
Perhaps not surprisingly, the focus of research in social psychology is often influenced by real world events. The atrocities of World War II led social psychologists like Kurt Lewin, who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and many of social psychologyâs progenitors, such as Solomon Asch, Leon Festinger, Muzafer Sherif, and Henri Tajfel, to study processes such as conformity, power, group dynamics, and prejudice. Their research had direct relevance to the study of attitudes and the types of questions that people began to address. Basically, the study of attitudes picked up momentum in an attempt to tackle greater societal concerns.
For instance, Theodore Adorno and colleagues (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) were curious about the processes that lead individuals to develop authoritarian attitudes. In particular, they studied the social psychological bases of anti-Semitic attitudes. Their development of the F-scale (the F stood for Fascism) and their research on authoritarianism played an important role in understanding the development of prejudice against minority ethnic groups. Several decades later, fascinating research by Bob Altemeyer (1996, 2006) further developed this line of investigation, provoking a resurgence of interest in the concept of authoritarianism.
World War II affected social psychological research in other ways. Although attempts to understand the dynamics of persuasion can be traced back to Greek philosophy, the success of Nazi propaganda campaigns made Allied powers realize the importance of understanding how to mobilize and change public opinion. During the war, one of the founders of attitude research, Carl Hovland, took a leave of absence from Yale to become Chief Psychologist and Director of Experimental Studies for the United States War Department. His research during this time attempted to discover methods for making the United Statesâ war propaganda more effective at sustaining public morale.
After the war, interest in persuasion remained strong due to the emergence of the Cold War and developments in telecommunications (such as the wide availability of television). Consequently, upon returning to Yale, Hovland, Irving Janis, and others within the âYale Schoolâ continued to study how individuals respond to persuasive messages. These researchers instigated scientific research on attitude change examining when and how attitudes are most likely to change (see, e.g., Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953). As noted by McGuire (1986), the Yale Schoolâs approach was convergent in that it started with a particular phenomenon (i.e., attitude change) that needed explanation. The researchers would assess a wide array of variables in order to determine which ones are important in explaining the phenomenon. Most important, these researchers addressed how factors such as characteristics of the message source, message recipient, and the persuasive message itself determine the likelihood of attitude change. Their findings were influential in helping social psychologists begin to understand how and when persuasion is most likely to occur. Further, their work had an impact on subsequent models of attitude change (see Chapter 5).
While Hovland and colleagues were developing their research on persuasion, L...
