ABSTRACT
One of the most important recent developments in the study of attitudes has been the growing interest in indirect measures of attitudes. Traditionally, researchers used self-report measures that allowed respondents to reflect on and express their attitudes toward objects or object features in a conscious, deliberate way. However, such direct measures of attitudes have a number of drawbacks (e.g., Dovidio & Fazio, 1992; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). First, direct measures of attitudes are susceptible to deception and self-presentational strategies. Second, in daily life, people often do not analyse their attitudes toward objects in a conscious and deliberate manner. In such cases, behavior can be guided by a spontaneous, automatic affective appraisal of the attitude object (e.g., Zajonc, 1980). Assuming that attitudes are stored in memory as associations between the representation of the attitude object and the representation of positive or negative valence (e.g., Fazio, 1986), such an automatic affective appraisal of objects can be regarded as equivalent to automatic attitude activation. Although there is some disagreement as to whether automatic attitude activation reflects a fundamentally different type of attitude than consciously constructed stimulus evaluations (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), most authors agree that direct measures of attitudes are not well suited to measure the spontaneous affective reactions to attitude objects that often guide behavior.
