ABSTRACT
Few constructs in social psychology and the social sciences more generally have been as influential as the construct of attitude (Allport, 1935). Over the years, some social scientists have used the term “attitude” to refer to a wide range of subjective judgments, whereas others have used the term more narrowly to refer to evaluative judgments of targets. In contemporary social psychology, an attitude is typically defined as a relatively general and enduring evaluation of an object or concept on a valence dimension ranging from negative to positive. These evaluations can be attached to virtually anything, including people, social groups, physical objects, behaviors, and abstract concepts. Given that attitudes have typically been defined in terms of valence (negative versus positive) and extremity (the magnitude of the deviation of the evaluation from neutrality), it is not surprising that traditional attitude measurement techniques have represented an attitude as a single numerical value on an evaluative continuum (e.g., see Likert, 1932; Thurstone, 1928). However, even early theorists recognized that any measure describing an attitude exclusively in terms of its valence and extremity was inadequate to capture all the relevant properties of an attitude (e.g., see Thurstone, 1928). Thus, many early attitude theorists proposed additional properties of attitudes that were important to understanding attitudinal processes. For instance, they suggested that it was useful to distinguish between different types of evaluative responses comprising attitudes (i.e., affect, cognition, and behavior; e.g., Katz & Stotland,1959; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960), the functions that attitudes can serve (e.g., Katz & Stotland, 1959; Smith, Bruner, & White, 1956), the amount of information on which attitudes are based (e.g., Rosenberg & Abelson, 1960), and the extent to which attitudes are linked to other attitudes (e.g., Converse, 1964). In short, attitude researchers have long acknowledged the importance of understanding the structure of attitudes.
