ABSTRACT
The use of attitude change to study cognitive structure was suggested to me during my first year in graduate school. An interest in understanding the structure of thought—how our ideas are organized and what determines how one idea follows from another—had drawn me into graduate study in psychology. A course in physiological psychology dealt with the technique of teasing out the histological structure of the nervous system by putting in lesions or electrical impulses at various places in the spinal cord or brain and tracing the ramifications through the central nervous system. The analogy occurred to me that perhaps I could put in changes at focused points in the belief system and get to understand the organization of mind by tracing the ideological and behavioral ramifications of these experimentally induced, focused alterations.
