The Construction of Attitudes

Attitudes have long been considered a central concept of social psychology. In fact, early writers have defined social psychology as the scientific study of attitudes (e.g., Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918) and in 1954 Gordon Allport noted, "This concept is probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology" (p. 43). As one may expect of any concept that has received decades of attention, the concept of attitudes has changed over the years (see Allport, 1954, for an early review). The initial definitions were broad and encompassed cognitive, affective, motivational, and behavioral components. For example, Allport (1935) defined an attitude as "a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive and dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related" (p. 810). A decade later, Krech and Crutchfield (1948) wrote, "An attitude can be defined as an enduring organization of motivational, emotional, perceptual, and cognitive processes with respect to some aspect of the individual's world" (p. 152). These definitions emphasized the enduring nature of attitudes and their close relationship to individuals' defined attitudes simply in terms of the probability that a person will show a specified behavior in a specified situation. In subsequent decades, the attitude concept lost much of its breadth and was largely reduced to its evaluative component. In the succinct words of Daryl Bem, "Attitudes are likes and dislikes" attitudes as "a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor" (p. 1). Along the way, many functions that were initially ascribed to attitudes have been reassigned to other cognitive structures and the accumulating body of empirical findings drew many of the classic assumptions into question. A growing body of literature suggests that attitudes may be much less enduring and stable than has traditionally been assumed. As we review below, self-reports of attitudes are highly context-dependent and can be profoundly influenced by minor changes in question wording, question format or question order. Attitudes-3 their assessment is subject to contextual influences. For other researchers, the same findings indicate that all we assess in attitude measurement are evaluative judgments that respondents construct at the time they are asked, based on whatever information happens to be accessible (e.g., Schwarz & Strack, 1991). From this perspective, the traditional attitude concept may not be particularly useful and we may learn more …