ABSTRACT
Lately there have been strong hints of a rebirth of interest in functional theories of attitudes. This class of theories, initiated long ago by Brewster Smith and Daniel Katz (Katz, 1960, 1968; Smith, 1947; Smith, Bruner, & White, 1956), posits that people hold and express certain attitudes and beliefs because doing so meets psychological needs, which vary from one individual to another. This interesting motivational view has been in long eclipse in the literature, partly because it flies in the face of the dominant information processing paradigm of social cognition (Hastie, 1983; McGuire, 1986; Wyer & Srull, 1984), partly because there have been no clear methods for measuring the several functions that attitudes might serve, and perhaps partly due to theoretical confusion as to what particular functions to distinguish.
