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Attitudes

Their Structure, Function and Consequences

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Series: Key Readings in Social Psychology.

The study of likes and dislikes - what social psychologists refer to as "attitudes" - has been a central focus of the field for decades. What are attitudes? How can we study and measure them scientifically? How are they formed and changed? Of what functional value, if any, are they? How do they come to influence our attention, perception, judgments, and behavior? These are among the questions that have spurred social psychological research on attitudes, and they are among the issues addressed in this volume.

The articles reprinted in this collection represent noteworthy developments in the field's understanding of attitudes. Together, the readings provide a representative and broad coverage of the literature, illustrating well what the field has come to learn about the structure, function, and consequences of attitudes.

Table of Contents

Preface

Richard E. Petty and Russell H. Fazio

SECTION (A) Conceptualizing Attitudes

READING 1. Attitudes: A New Look at an Old Concept

Mark P. Zanna and John K. Rempel

READING 2. On the Automatic Activation of Attitudes

Russell H. Fazio, David M. Sanbonmatsu, Martha C. Powell, and Frank R. Kardes

SECTION (B) Measurement of Attitudes

READING 3. Attitudes Can Be Measured

L. L. Thurstone

READING 4. Self-Reports: How the Questions Shape the Answers

Norbert Schwarz

READING 5. Electromyographic Activity over Facial Muscle Regions Can Differentiate the Valence and Intensity of Affective Reactions

John T. Cacioppo, Richard E. Petty, Mary E. Losch, and Hai Sook Kim

READING 6. Variability in Automatic Activation as an Unobtrusive Measure of Racial Attitudes: A Bona Fide Pipeline?

Russell H. Fazio, Joni R. Jackson, Bridget C. Dunton, and Carol J. Williams

READING 7. Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test

Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L.K. Schwartz

SECTION (C) Affective, Cognitive, and Behavioral Bases of Attitudes

READING 8. An Investigation of the Relationship between Beliefs about an Object and the Attitude toward that Object

Martin J. Fishbein

READING 9. Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences

Robert B. Zajonc

READING 10. Affective-Cognitive Consistency and the Effect of Salient Behavioral Information on the Self-Perception of Attitudes

Shelly Chaiken and Mark W. Baldwin

READING 11. Assessing the Structure of Prejudicial Attitudes: The Case of Attitudes toward Homosexuals

Geoffrey Haddock, Mark P. Zanna, and Victoria M. Esses

READING 12. Thinking and Caring about Cognitive Inconsistency: When and for Whom Does Attitudinal Ambivalence Feel Uncomfortable?

Ian R. Newby-Clark, Ian McGregor, and Mark P. Zanna

PART (D) Functions of Attitudes

READING 13. The Functional Approach to the Study of Attitudes

Daniel Katz

READING 14. Appeals to Image and Claims about Quality: Understanding the Psychology of Advertising

Mark Snyder and Kenneth G. DeBono

READING 15. Matching Versus Mismatching Attitude Functions: Implications for Scrutiny of Persuasive Messages

Richard E. Petty and Duane T. Wegener

READING 16. Prejudice as Self-Image Maintenance: Affirming the Self through Derogating Others

Steven Fein and Steven J. Spencer

READING 17. On the Functional Value of Attitudes: The Influence of Accessible Attitudes upon the Ease and Quality of Decision Making

Russell H. Fazio, Jim Blascovich, and Denise M. Driscoll

READING 18. Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions

Timothy D. Wilson and Jonathan W. Schooler

SECTION (E) Impact on Perception and Judgment

READING 19. They Saw a Game: A Case Study

Albert H. Hastorf and Hadley Cantril

READING 20. Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence

Charles G. Gord, Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper

READING 21. The Effect of Attitude on the Recall of Personal Histories

Michael Ross, Cathy McFarland, and Garth J.O. Gletcher

READING 22. On the Orienting Value of Attitudes: Attitude Accessibility as a Determinant of an Object’s Attraction of Visual Attention

David R. Roskos-Ewoldsen and Russell H. Fazio

READING 23. Selective Exposure: Voter Information Preferences and the Watergate Affair

Paul D. Sweeney and Kathy L. Gruber

SECTION (F) Impact on Behavior

READING 24. Attitudes versus Actions

Richard T. LaPiere

READING 25. Attitude Prototypes as Determinants of Attitude-Behavior Consistency

Charles G. Lord, Mark R. Lepper, and Diane Mackie

READING 26. Attitudinal and Normative Variables as Predictors of Specific Behaviors

Icek Ajzen and Martin Fishbein

READING 27. Attitude Accessibility as a Moderator of the Attitude-Perception and Attitude-Behavior Relations: An Investigation of the 1984 Presidential Election

Russell H. Fazio and Carol J. Williams

Author Biography

Russell H. Fazio received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1978. He is currently the Harold E. Burtt Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University. Fazio’s program of research focuses upon attitudes, their formation, accessibility from memory, functional value, and the processes by which they influence attention, judgment, and behavior. He served as editor of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology from 1999 to 2003. He has received numerous honors, including the APA Early Career Award (1983) and the Thomas M. Ostrom Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Cognition (2006).

Richard E. Petty received his B.A. (with high distinction) from the University of Virginia in 1973, and his Ph.D. in social psychology from Ohio State University in 1977. He is currently Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University. Petty’s work focuses on attitudes, persuasion, and social cognition. He is former editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and author of seven books and over 200 journal articles and chapters. He has received various honors including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2001) and the Society for Consumer Psychology (2000).

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