Theories of attitude

Jeff Keller (1999) penned the self-help book entitled Attitude is Everything. We agree. Countless individuals and groups state that attitudes are important, and in many walks of life (e.g., motivational experts, organizations, salespeople; Russell-McCloud, 1999; Ryan, 1999; Wal-Mart Canada, 1997). In social psychological research, Gordon Allport (1935) was among the first to speculate that attitude is a fundamental variable. This assertion spawned decades of attempts to capture properties of the attitude concept, using theory and empirical studies. Nonetheless, it is equivocal whether all these attempts to study attitudes actually examined precisely the same concept. In this chapter, we describe the ways in which the past research has used diverse conceptualizations of attitudes, and we describe an agenda for integrating and extending these theories.