ABSTRACT
In chapter 2, we already described that in order to construct an attitude people need to retrieve relevant information. Before we continue, we need to de®ne more precisely what we mean by the buzz word `` information''. When we speak of information we mean anything that informs a person about his or her evaluation of the attitude object. For example, research evidence suggests that when asked for their attitudes toward different social categories (e.g. politicians) people retrieve exemplars of these categories (e.g. Bill Clinton), presumably because these exemplars are used for constructing the attitude (Sia, Lord, Blessum, Thomas, & Lepper, 1999). Clearly, the most prototypical information are beliefs about the attitude object, but note that a belief is hardly informative regarding the evaluation of the attitude object unless the belief itself is evaluated. Of course, everything we have said so far about how evaluations come about also applies to the evaluation of beliefs. And everything we will say in the following about situational in¯uences on evaluations also applies. But besides evaluated beliefs, feelings evoked by the attitude object may also serve as information, as we will elaborate below. In contrast to beliefs, feelings always include an evaluative component. Another source of information is one's own behaviour (Bem, 1972). As people often infer another person's attitude from the behaviour this person shows, Bem argues that people may also observe their own behaviour to draw inferences about their own attitudes, a point we will elaborate in chapter 8. Other sources of information may be mental images, past experiences or current bodily states. Some of these will be addressed in more detail below.
