ABSTRACT
Throughout its history in social psychology, the attitude construct has been defined in myriad ways. Core to most definitions has been that attitudes reflect evaluations of objects on a dimension ranging from positive to negative. Thus, researchers have characteri?ecl aLtitudes in terms oftheir valence and extremity. In practice, attitudes have been routinely represented by a single numerical index reflecting the position of an attitude object on an evaluative continuum. However, social scientists have long recognized that characterizing allitudcs solely in terms of valence and extremity is insufficient to fully capture all relevant properties of an attitude. For example. in his seminal article on attitude measurement, Thurstone (1928) noted that attitudes arc multifaceted and that attempting to describe them with a single numerical index is analogous to attempting to describe an object like a kitchen table with a single numerical index. Other early attitude researchers also noted a variety of relevant attitudinal properties. For example, early advocates of the tripartite perspective proposed that evaluative responses could be classified into the categories of affect, behavior, and cognition (e.g., Katz & Stotland, 1959; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960; Smith, 1947). Other scholars distinguished among the underlying functions a global evaluation might serve (e.g., Katz, 1960; Katz & Stotland, 1959; Smith, Bruner, & White, 1956). And still others noted that evaluations might vary in the amount of information on which they were based (e.g., Rosenberg & Abelson, 1960) and the extent to which they were linked to other attitudes (e.g., Converse, 1964). Thus. social scientists have long recognized the importance of attitude structure. In this chapter, our first goal is to acquaint readers with the major theories and empirical findings that have emerged in over 60 years of attitude structure research. We also hope to highlight important unresolved i~sues. suggest some new ways of organizing and interpreting past results, and provide possible directions for future research.
