ABSTRACT
The fact that groups of individuals, and societies, unlike the objects of natural scientific study, provide interpretations of themselves, gives rise to an epistemological distinction unique to the social sciences. The relevant ‘psychological objects’ may be of various kinds: questionnaire items, picture, cards, an interviewer’s questions, written stories, and so on. Much of sociological theory postulates a ‘strain towards consistency’, both with regard to the interrelationships of an individual’s attitudes, and as between his attitudes and behaviour. Even the changing relations between an individual’s public and private attitudes do not seem wholly closed to empirical inquiry. It is important, therefore, to conceptualize and explain the relationship between an individual’s ‘real’ attitudes and his expressed attitudes and between his expressed attitudes and his overt actions, and this importance derives from both pragmatic and theoretical reasons. Beside an ever-growing abundance of attitude surveys in social science, the paucity of studies on the behavioural correlates of these attitudes is particularly marked.
