ABSTRACT
The history of research on attitudes is marked by two characteristics. First, the concept of attitude is popular and widely accepted. It is a textbook staple and a useful theoretical construct for behavioral, mathematical, field-theoretical, and cognitive approaches. Second, the concept of attitude has been associated with a number of unreliable effects such as selective exposure, the sleeper effect in persuasion, behavior prediction, and selective learning. These null and contradictory findings have encouraged some to question the utility of the attitude concept (cf. Abelson, 1972; Wicker, 1969).
