ABSTRACT
It now has been over 10 years since my colleagues and I first suggested that attitudes can be viewed as associations in memory between an attitude object and one’s evaluation of the object, and that the strength of this association determines the accessibility of the attitude from memory (Fazio, Chen, McDonel, & Sherman, 1982). This view, and its assorted implications, have proven very fruitful—much more so than I had envisioned at the time. What was initiated as a program of research aimed at illuminating a process by which attitudes might guide behavior mushroomed into a fairly general perspective with broad implications for a number of phenomena beyond our original concerns with attitude-behavior consistency. Issues revolving around this theoretical perspective have absorbed my laboratory for over a decade. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of what we have learned over the years regarding the determinants, consequences, and correlates of attitude accessibility. Along the way, I point to some of the many interesting questions that remain to be addressed.
