ABSTRACT
Attitudes are people’s evaluations of “objects” as diverse as capital punishment, equality, Japanese, essay exams, me, and writing a chapter for Rich and Jon’s book on attitude strength. According to our conception of attitudes (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993), they develop on the basis of affective, cognitive, and behavioral responding to attitude objects (or related cues) and represent, or summarize, the evaluative implications of one or a mixture of these three response classes. Thus a person’s abstract evaluation, or attitude toward an object, may be based on one or more of these three types of input (see also Zanna & Rempel, 1988). Once an attitude is formed, a mental representation of the abstract evaluation and also of associated affects, beliefs, and behaviors may be stored in memory. Attitudes and these other aspects of attitude structure may thus be activated upon exposure to the attitude object or to related cues (see also Fazio, 1989; Higgins, 1989).
