ABSTRACT
Researching attitudes is a challenging endeavor because attitudes and attitude-related phenomena are highly complex. A functional approach to the study of attitudes is capable of capturing some of this complexity because it recognizes that the variety of psychological needs and goals served by various attitude processes (such as attitude formation, maintenance, change and expression) are constrained by properties inherent in the attitude objects under scrutiny, by the dispositional tendencies of persons holding the attitudes, and by the situational contingencies and demands of differing contexts. In brief, different attitude processes can serve different functions for different objects, and all this may be true for different people in different situations.
