ABSTRACT
Attitude structure is a timely topic because social psychology is moving into a 1980s and 1990s systems era in which it will be a central concern (McGuire, 1986a). This systems preoccupation will be the third time that attitudes has become social psychology’s central focus since the discipline emerged as a respected field of psychology in the 1920s. The first flourishing of social psychology in the 1920s and 1930s was focused on attitude measurement with psychologists like Bogardus, Thurstone, and Likert bequeathing a legacy of still-popular scaling procedures. Interest in attitudes declined during the 1935 to 1955 group dynamics era of social psychology but reemerged in the 1950s and 1960s attitude-change flourishing. Now, after the recent 1965 to 1985 social cognition era, we are witnessing the emergence of a third attitude flourishing, likely to dominate in the 1980s and 1990s, focused on attitude systems—their content, structure, and functioning.
