ABSTRACT
I t is reasonable to begin a text on attitudes with Allport’s (1935, p. 798) famous dictum that attitudes are “the most distinctive and indispensable concept in American social psychology.” The gist of Allport’s observation undoubtedly was true at the time of its publication, and is largely true even today, more than seven decades later, but McGuire’s measured appraisal also is true, and refl ects social psychology’s less than unremitting romance with attitudes over the past half-century. An attitude
represents an evaluative integration of cognitions and affects experienced in relation to an object. Attitudes are the evaluative judgments that integrate and summarize these cognitive/affective reactions. These evaluative abstractions vary in strength, which in turn has implications for persistence, resistance, and attitude-behavior consistency. (Crano & Prislin, 2006, p. 347)
Our best chroniclers have noted the ebb and fl ow of the fi eld’s fascination with attitudes (Jones, 1988), and McGuire (1985, p. 235) even identifi ed “Three peakings of attitude research,” which describe periods of the fi eld’s most insistent focus on this construct. The fi rst peaking, in the1920s and 1930s, refl ected social psychology’s concern with the fundamental nature of attitudes and their measurement. The second peaking, which occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, was
focused on factors that affected attitude change. The third peaking, from the1980s and (McGuire predicted) into the 1990s, was focused on attitude systems, a “structuralist surge” that focused on the “content, structure, and functioning of attitude complexes” (p. 236).
