ABSTRACT
This chapter describes and evaluate representative research that bears upon the validity of balance theory in describing the way in which cognitions are interrelated. Several theoretical formulations of cognitive organization pertain primarily to cognitions about one object’s feelings or affect for another. Cognitions about positive unit relations and positive sentiment relations may function similarly because the two object-categories involved in these relations have common members. The usefulness of Robert P. Abelson and M. J. Rosenberg procedure for determining balance increases with the size and complexity of the cognitive system to which it is applied. If cognitions are organized according to the principle of cognitive balance, sets of balanced relations should be easier to learn and remember than imbalanced sets of relations. The accuracy of the equation in describing the theoretical relations would theoretically be an index of the degree of consistency among the cognitions involved.
