ABSTRACT
Following the development of formal attitude scaling techniques in the 1920s and 1930s, social scientists have been intensely interested in measuring the public’s opinions on a wide range of topics (see McGuire, 1986). The birth of the science of public opinion afforded investigators the ability to forecast presidential elections, helped companies to peddle their goods, and aided the government in raising money to defeat the Nazis in World War H (Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Sheffield, 1949). Not until the 1950s and 1960s, however, did the
attitude researchers turn their attention to matters of attitude theory such as how attitudes are formed, structured, and changed.
