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Attitudes: Introduction and Scope
Dolores Albarracin Mark P. Zanna
University of Florida University of Waterloo
Blair T. Johnson G. Tarcan Kumkale
University of Connecticut University of Florida
ATTITUDES: DEFINITIONS, PROCESSES, AND THEORIES
Human beings react to their environments in an evaluative fashion. They love and protect their
kin and strive to maintain positive evaluations of themselves as well as those around them. They
evaluate others' attractiveness. They also evaluate and select leaders, decide how to spend their
resources, and plan for the futures they envision. Such covert and overt actions often involve
judgments about whether objects, events, oneself, and others are favorable or unfavorable,
likeable or unlikeable, good or bad. Scholars who study attitudes investigate factors involved
in these evaluations: how they are formed, changed, represented in memory, and translated
into cognitions, motivations, and actions.
In this introductory chapter, we first discuss the nature of attitudes and then the organization
of this handbook. Scholars have investigated many different constructs related to attitudes
using many different theoretical frameworks and methods. The constructs that investigators
have studied often concern affect, beliefs, and (overt) behaviors. Affect entails the feelings that
people experience and may or may not concern a particular object or event (Berkowitz, 2000).
Beliefs are cognitions about the probability that an object or event is associated with a given
attribute (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Behaviors are typically defined as the overt actions of an
individual. Each of these individual phenomena is central to the dynamic forces that form and
transform existing attitudes. Similarly, attitudes have a reciprocal impact on affects, beliefs, and
behaviors. It is this matrix of reciprocal attitudinal forces that constitutes a major portion of this
handbook.
Before providing a more extensive introduction to the matrix of reciprocal attitudinal re-
lations and the rationale for its use, we first discuss definitions of the attitude concept itself
and distinguish attitudes from affects, beliefs, and behaviors. We continue by explaining why
attitudes are not necessarily stable entities. We then discuss the rationale for the volume's orga-
nization and introduce each chapter. The organization of the volume is centered around basic
phenomena that attitudes scholars consider conventional relations rather than on a particular
4 ALBARRACIN ET AL.
singular theoretical viewpoint. Nonetheless, theories play a central role within each chapter of
this volume.
THE NATURE OF ATTITUDES
Defining Attitude
A handbook is a collective enterprise. Consequently, reaching definitions that satisfy all con-
tributors and readers is as difficult as it is indispensable. It is difficult because hundreds of
definitions exist. It is indispensable because, to develop a handbook of attitudes, contributors
must know the range of phenomena they might cover and precisely conceptualize the processes
at stake. Eagly and Chaiken (1993) provided what may be the most conventional contemporary
definition; specifically, an "attitude is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluat-
ing a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor" (p. 1, emphasis in original).
The contributors to the current volume have embraced evaluative aspects as central to the
topic, as have prominent other treatises on the subject (e.g., Eagly & Chaiken, 1998; Zanna &
Rempel, 1988). Although definitions may have varied somewhat across time, if one inspects
how scholars have operationalized the concept of attitude across the field's history, evalua-
tive aspects have always played a prominent role (e.g., Bogardus, 1931; Fishbein & Ajzen,
1975; Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953; Katz, 1960; Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957;
Petty & Cacioppo, 1981, 1986; Petty & Wegener, 1998; Sherif & Hovland, 1961; Thurstone,
The study of attitudes includes both the judgments that individuals form online (Schwarz
& Bohner, 2001) as well as the evaluative representations in memory (Fazio, 1986). If the
term attitude were reserved only to refer to stable structures in memory, excluded would be
all the work in which researchers verify only temporary changes on an attitude scale, as well
as an impressive amount of research on context effects in the study of attitudes. Moreover,
conceptualizing attitudes as memories but not judgments could possibly exclude the literature
on attitude formation and change, because these literatures concern the observation of judg-
mental outcomes much more often than they involve measures of memory. Thus, attitudes can
be judgments, memories, or both.
A good definition of a construct must not only be general but also sufficiently discriminating.
After all, there are multiple levels of generality and almost all definitions could be represented
at an even more abstract level. Consider the definition of beliefs as the perceived likelihood
that an attribute is associated with an object (e.g., Fishbein, 1963). For instance, I may believe
that Coca-Cola is sweet or that my country is now in a state of military alert. An examination
of the deep structure of attitudes makes it clear that one could also define attitudes as beliefs
(see Kruglanski & Stroebe, this volume; Wyer & Albarracin, this volume). Thus, a favorable
attitude toward social psychology might be defined as the perceived probability that the object
social psychology is positive or negative (Wyer, 1974).
Because attitudes and beliefs are at some level both categorizations, one could argue that
treating them as indistinct would make for a more compact definition. Indeed, compactness
was one of our explicit objectives in initiating this handbook. Nonetheless, we also had the
conflicting objective to reach sufficiently discriminating definitions so that one could distin-
guish between categories that have different properties and, often, different outcomes. In this
fashion, the concepts may appear to differ phenomenologically with some consensus. For in-
stance, although a belief and an attitude are both categorizations, and all categorizations can be
conceptualized as a probability assignment, Eagly and Chaiken (1993) noted that at least some
beliefs can be verified or falsified with external, objective criteria, whereas attitudes have more
6 ALBARRACIN ET AL.
FIG l. l. Attitudes depicted as judgments influenced by external information, the mem-
ory of past judgments, prior knowledge, and stored new judgments.
memory of a prior judgment, people often form judgments on the basis of information that is
temporarily available to them because the information is externally salient and/or momentarily
accessible in memory (see, e.g., Higgins, 1996). To this extent, people's evaluations of an
object can be represented in permanent memory or as judgments that individuals compute in an
online fashion at the time the evaluation becomes relevant. Therefore, although we differentiate
attitudes from affect, beliefs, and behavior, our definition of attitudes is inclusive enough
to encompass both stable, memory-based evaluations, and online, temporarily constructed
ones.
Figure 1.1 depicts the possibility that people's initial judgment about an object may be
stored for later use. The representation of that evaluative judgment in permanent memory,
however, is distinct from the initial judgment performed online and from later judgments that
one can possibly form after recalling the initial judgment. One kind of representation exists in
a latent, stored fashion (see dotted contours), even when people are currently unaware of it (see
Krosnick, Judd, & Wittenbrink, this volume). The other type of representation, the judgment,
only exists in consciousness or working memory (solid contours), either after retrieving an old
judgment or computing a new one on the basis of a prior judgment or other information that
is accessible in memory or externally supplied.
ORGANIZATION OF THE HANDBOOK OF ATTITUDES
The chapters in this handbook clearly show that the attitudes field is vast and diverse on both
methodological and conceptual grounds, accumulating over 80-plus years. The field is con-
cerned with a variety of phenomena that occur as a result of the interaction between individuals
and the society in which they live. These phenomena take place in the hearts and minds of the
individual members of a society, but also across interpersonal communications and in the con-
text of cultural and social representations that transcend the individual. For example, people's
attitudes are generally the result both of relatively long-term processes such as socialization
and of relatively short-term exposures to information in the environment. Some attitudes may
even be inherited (e.g., Tesser, 1993). These inputs undergo sequential transformations that
give way to individual and social affective reactions, beliefs, attitudes, and overt actions. These
cognitions and behaviors acquire a life of their own and interact dynamically, generating and
1. ATTITUDES: INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE 7
receiving influences in a mutual, ever-changing cycle. This dynamic has different degrees of
consciousness, going from largely deliberate processes to subtle mechanisms of control that
may lie completely outside of awareness.
Theories remain important in contemporary studies of attitude, perhaps even more important
than they have been in the past. Yet because the numerous attitudes theories do not necessarily
make the same predictions about attitudinal phenomena nor even concern the same phenomena
and because there is no one theory with hegemony over the field, it would be misleading to
use any single theoretical approach to organize all knowledge about the topic. Instead, the
contributors to the current volume have kept as a distinct philosophy a fair treatment of the
theoretical diversity relevant to the attitudinal phenomenon under consideration.
Methodological Considerations
Regardless of which theories scholars use to explore attitudinal phenomena, central to the
endeavor is the use of scientific methods to provide observations that may be confirmed and
extended by other scholars. Where relevant, each of the chapters in this volume considers
methods of import. Most centered on methodological aspects is Jon Krosnick, Charles Judd,
and Bernd Wittenbrink's chapter, which thoroughly reviews classic and contemporary mea-
surement methods in the area of attitudes, including an insightful analysis of the advantages and
disadvantages of each procedure. The chapter is unique in its concentration on the processes
by which attitudes are expressed. Exemplifying this focus is their framework describing the
cognitive processes that generate an attitudinal evaluation as well as other response tendencies.
Krosnick and colleagues use this framework to derive various important recommendations for
the optimal measurement of attitudes. Following this chapter are a series of chapters analyzing
reciprocal causal relations of attitudes with affects, beliefs, and behaviors, and the structural
features of each of these four phenomena. We introduce these chapters next, before introducing
the concluding series of chapters that systematically describe ways in which the phenomena
in earlier chapters can be integrated.
Chapters on Individual Attitudinal Phenomena—A Matrix of Attitude Relations
A central organizing principle of the handbook is the matrix depicted in Table 1.1, which
includes general causes and effects relevant to attitudes. Similar to a correlation matrix, the
cells off the diagonal are heterocorrelations and on the diagonal are autocorrelations. Thus,
the different cells in Table 1.1 depict possible causal influences of (a) attitudes on affective
reactions, beliefs, and behavior, (b) behavior on affective reactions, beliefs, and attitudes, (c)
beliefs on affective reactions, attitudes, and behavior, and (d) affective reactions on beliefs,
attitudes, and behavior. The upper and lower triangles of the matrix are mirror images of each
other, reversing the direction of the causal relation. Most of these influences are described
in the body of this handbook; others receive indirect coverage. In addition, the diagonal of
the matrix comprises the structure of affective reactions, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, or in
other words, the way in which each psychological component is organized. These chapters on
structure correspond to the diagonal cells in the matrix and address the way each psychological
component is organized as well as the factors that influence the entire group of components.
Table 1.1 also summarizes topics relevant to the matrix cells.
The heart of the handbook is a series of chapters that focus sequentially on the processes in-
volving the reciprocal relations of affect, beliefs, and behaviors with attitudes, and the structure
of each component. Goals are often considered simultaneously with beliefs, consistent with
Chapter 8 The Influence of Beliefs on Behavior The Influence of Beliefs on Attitudes
- Relations among attitudes, beliefs, and goals in the context of attitude structure, functions, and dynamics
- Attitudes, goals, and beliefs as knowledge structures
- Belief-based models of attitudes
- Ambivalence, dimensionality, mere exposure, conditioning, conformity
- Current theorizing on persuasion
- Majority and minority influence
- Motivated reasoning
Chapter 1 1 The Influence of Affect on Behavior The Influence of Affect on Attitudes
- The role of affect in attitude formation and persuasion
- Dimensions of affective experience (valence and arousal) and attitudes
- Mood effects on judgment, affect-as-information, affect-as-evidence
- Role of emotion and mood in styles of thinking or processing
- Unconscious affective influences on attitudes
- Affect and the use of category information (stereotyping)
- Affect and evolutionary perspectives
Chapter 7 The Structure of Beliefs — Definition, structure, acquisition, and change of beliefs
- Theories of belief organization and change
- Computation and motivational processes from which beliefs emerge
- Inference, comprehension, and memory processes in belief formation and change
- Heuristic and motivational bases of belief formation and change
The Influence of Affect on Beliefs
The Influence of Beliefs on Affect
Chapter 10 The Structure of Affect
- Operationalization and conceptualization of affect in attitude research
- Unconscious and conscious affective experiences
- Types of affective experiences and their origins and implications for attitudes
- Frequency, intensity, and duration of affective experiences
- Conditioning, mere-exposure, mood-as-information
- Representation of affect in memory
- Recentfindingsin affective neuroscience
Note: Each cell off the diagonal refers to a causal combination of the attitudes, behavior, beliefs, and affect (feelings) variables. Shaded cells indicate phenomena with only indirect coverage in this handbook.
1 O ALBARRACIN ET AL.
trends in recent research. As relevant, each set of authors discuss theories for their attitudinal
phenomena. The dimensions that organize the handbook and the specific interactions they
generate have charted some new territory. For example, as we describe in the following sections,
attitude researchers have conceptualized the interrelations among beliefs, affect, attitudes, and
behavior. Yet researchers have rarely considered the degree to which an extant attitude biases
subsequent affective reactions. Therefore, the challenge of the handbook was sometimes to
identify research outside of the writers' domain, extrapolate findings, generate a relatively
complete line of facts and hypotheses about the issues at stake, and encourage future research
(see, e.g., Marsh & Wallace, this volume). Research conducted in other fields (e.g., political
behavior, intergroup relationships, mental health) and research not surveyed in prior books of
attitudes was also useful in achieving this synthesis (see, e.g., Ottati, Edwards, & Krumdick,
this volume).
Chapter 3. The Structure of Attitudes (Fabrigor, MacDonald, & Wegener).
As we previously discussed, attitudes impute some degree of favor or disfavor to an entity
(Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). They are sometimes relatively isolated from other representations
and other times tightly connected with other attitudes forming an ideology. There are already
wonderful reviews of attitude structure in the literature (see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, 1998),
but Leandre Fabrigar, Tara MacDonald, and Duane Wegener's chapter concentrates on the
specific structure of attitudes (Fazio, 1986; Judd & Kulik, 1980;Kerlinger, 1984;Ostrom, 1989;
Sherif & Hovland, 1961) and its properties, including strength, accessibility, importance, and
confidence. Finally, this chapter addresses attitude complexity, general principles of change in
attitude structure, and awareness of attitude structure.
Chapter 4. The Origins and Structure of Behavior: Conceptualizing Behau-
ior in Attitude Research (Jaccard & Blanton). As James Jaccard and Hart Blanton
review, the field of attitudes is particularly fascinating in recent years because it attempts to
understand behavior outside of awareness as well as conscious and goal-directed behavior (see,
e.g., Bargh, 1997; Vallacher & Wegner, 1985; Wegner, 1994). Despite the current interest in
behavior, there are still limitations to our understanding of behavioral processes. For example,
how many behaviors compose the act of smoking? What is the structure of behaviors, and how
do the perception and recall of behaviors operate (see, e.g., Nisbett & Borgida, 1975; Schank
& Abelson, 1977)? How do people determine that they consistently engage in a behavior?
When people determine that they have performed a behavior, do they use habitual behavior as
information, or do they simply use past behaviors that are salient at a given time?
Chapter 5. The influence of Attitudes on Behauior (Ajzen & Fishbein). It
seems obvious that people's attitudes are likely to orient their behavior in the future (Allport,
1935; but see LaPiere, 1934; Wicker, 1969). If one likes a given brand of coffee, one should
then be more likely to select that brand over others. The issues surrounding the relation be-
tween attitudes and behavior are, however, more complex. As Icek Ajzen and Martin Fishbein
review, over the years, researchers have identified numerous factors that moderate the size
of the attitude-behavior association, including such factors as prior experience, confidence,
accessibility, and attitude change. In addition, an effort to further theorize the mechanisms
involved in the attitudinal control of behavior seems desirable. Finally, the attitude-behavior
relation includes attention and exposure to information, such as search strategies that may
sometimes be directed by people's preferences (Frey, 1986).
The field has known for some time that people's attitudes and intentions serve as a basis for
the behaviors they manifest (see Dulany, 1968; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). In addition, uncon-
scious attitudes may have the same effects depending on the circumstances in which they are
1 2 ALBARRACIN ET AL.
also Anderson, 1981) theory of reasoned action asserts that the attitude toward the behavior is
a function of subjectively weighting the evaluative implications of each possible outcome /' of
the behavior ( e i , i — 1,... , n) by the belief that this outcome i will occur (bi ,,/ = 1,... , n),
and then summing these weighted evaluations. Similarly, extrapolating Greenwald's (1968)
cognitive-response framework, Petty and Cacioppo (1986) also argued that thoughts about an
issue can influence people's attitudes, provided that they have the ability and motivation to
think about the issues being considered. Other theories have elaborated on the way in which
different kinds of beliefs influence attitudes. For example, Deutsch and Gerard (1955) argued
that people may form positive attitudes about an issue because they are convinced that there is
evidence in support of the issue or as a result of changes in normative beliefs.
In this chapter, Arie Kruglanski and Wolfgang Stroebe use attitude structure, function, and
dynamics to examine social psychological research on the influences of beliefs and goals on
attitudes. According to Kruglanski and Stroebe, attitude structure, functions, and dynamics
have typically been treated as separate and as though they are concerned with rather different
issues. Given that attitudes, goals, and beliefs are to some extent knowledge structures, their
functions and dynamics are also isomorphic. In this context, the authors review such diverse
past and contemporary work as expectancy-value models, information integration theory,
probabilogical models, mere exposure and conditioning phenomena, the elaboration likelihood
model, and the unimodel.
Chapter 9. The Influence of Attitudes on Beliefs: Formation and Change
(Marsh &• Wallace). Expectancy-value models assert that beliefs and the evaluations that
are associated with them are the informational basis for attitudes (Carlson, 1956). Yet, plenty
of other work highlights the reciprocal influences of attitudes on beliefs, as Kerry Marsh and
Harry Wallace review in this chapter. For example, McGuire (1960, 1990) has long argued that
people often believe that positive events are likely to happen and negative events are unlikely
to take place, and Rosenberg (1956) demonstrated that changing the value of an event can
alter the subjective probability of that event. There is also fascinating evidence of the effects
of justifying attitudes on the generation of beliefs. For instance, Wilson and his colleagues
(see e.g., Wilson, Dunn, Kraft & Lisle, 1989) argued that, when people are first asked to think
about reasons for liking or disliking an object, they generate criteria that seem plausible and
easy to articulate and then change their attitudes to make them consistent with these reasons.
Similarly, Tesser (1978) has reported that thinking about an issue generally yields a polarization
of attitudes toward that issue. Nonetheless, after the passage of some time, people may return to
the original basis for their attitudes and regret decisions guided by their reason-based attitudes
(Wilson & Hodges, 1992; Wilson & Schooler, 1991).
Traditionally, attitudinal models focused on the effects of beliefs on attitudes (see Kruglanski
& Stroebe, this volume). Consequently, much less is known about the causal relation linking
attitudes to beliefs. Nonetheless, Marsh and Wallace convincingly demonstrate that this part
of the equation deserves more attention. In general, attitudes exert biasing effects on beliefs,
such that people accept or revise their beliefs about attributes of the attitudinal object to make
them congenial with their attitudes. These biases are pervasive and obey both cognitive and
motivational principles. Marsh and Wallace close their chapter with speculation about the
conditions that strengthen or weaken attitude-belief congruence effects.
Chapter IO. The Structure of Affect (Schimmack & Crites). Without a doubt,
people experience affect and this experience guides their cognitions, attitudes, and behavior,
as Ulrich Schimmack and Stephen Crites review in their chapter. Affect concerns the feelings
that people experience and may or may not concern a particular object or event (Berkowitz,
2000). Affect is presumably organized along dimensions of arousal and valence (Watson &
1. ATTITUDES: INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE 1 3
Tellegen, 1985), although this conceptualization is not without controversy. For example, an
important question in relation to the structure of affect is whether positive and negative affect
are two poles of the same construct or, instead, orthogonal dimensions. Furthermore, to what
extent is it necessary to distinguish among different emotions to understand attitudes? How is
affect represented in memory? How does affect change over time? How can we induce affective
change over time? How and when do people become aware of their affective experience?
Chapter 11. The Influence of Affect on Attitudes (Clore & Schnall). People's
responses to the affect they experience are both reflex-like and voluntary, as Gerald Clore and
Simone Schnall examine in this chapter. For example, sensory inputs like taste or exposure to
heights can trigger visceral reactions, and these reactions can automatically induce avoidance.
Many of these hard-wired responses are the result of evolutionary influences. In addition, affect
arising from any reaction to the environment, including mere exposure to an attitude object
(Zajonc, 1968), can influence attitudes. In this regard, Schwarz and Clore (1983) postulated that
people are inclined to misattribute their mood states to the object they are asked to judge. As
a consequence of this misattribution, people rely on a how-do-I-feel-about-it heuristic to infer
their attitudes toward the other persons, things, and events they encounter. There are, however,
other mechanisms that may underlie the influences of one's affective reactions on one's attitudes
(see, e.g., Festinger, 1957; Forgas, 1995; Hovland et al., 1953; Kaplan & Anderson, 1973). For
example, Hildum and Brown (1956; see also Insko, 1965) were able to condition people to form
positive attitudes toward an issue when the interviewer's nonverbal reactions were positive,
and negative attitudes when the interviewer's subtle feedback was negative. Research on the
potential mechanisms of this effect has accumulated over the years, suggesting that at least
some of these influences do occur outside of awareness. As the chapter describes, however, the
role of awareness in this domain remains controversial. Individuals may scrutinize information
more carefully when they experience negative affect than when they experience positive affect
(Schwarz & Clore, 1996; Worth & Mackie, 1987), an issue that this chapter also examines.
Integrative Chapters on Attitudinal Phenomena
The matrix chapters examine with great detail a particular attitudinal phenomenon. However,
many theories of attitudes address general principles that apply to a variety of pairs of variables
at a time and thus may appear in a variety of cells within the matrix. For example, self-perception
(Bern, 1965, 1972) and affect-as-information (Schwarz & Clore, 1983,1996) mechanisms were
initially linked to attitudes but also apply to beliefs. Similarly, Wyer and Srull (1989) or Fazio
(1986) have used associative network models to represent the structure of beliefs and attitudes.
Similar conceptualizations could be used to understand more complex arrays of affect, beliefs,
attitudes, and behavior.
Other such principles include conditioning, cognitive consistency, drive reduction, and
incentives. These ideas cut across most cells of the matrix as they are relevant to all issues of
structure and relations involving affect, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior (see Johnson, Maio, &
Smith-McLallen, this volume; Ottati et al., this volume; Wegener & Carlston, this volume).
More recent ideas about parallel distributed processing (Carlston & Smith, 1996; Smith, 1996,
1998) may also explicate a variety of the relations represented in the matrix. To this extent,
Bassili and Brown's chapter in this volume serves to highlight the degree to which these
distributed perspectives can contribute to our understanding of implicit phenomena and attitude
stability or instability. Similarly, the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior (Ajzen
& Fishbein, 1980; Ajzen, 1991) postulate influences that are relevant to various associations
among beliefs, attitudes, and behavior and also to various domains (see Johnson et al., this
volume; Kruglanski & Stroebe, this volume; Ottati et al., this volume; Prislin & Wood, this
1. ATTITUDES: INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE 15
consistency, self-worth, and social approval. These four motives cut across almost all domains of social psychology, including the study of the self, identity, and social cognition. Brinol and Petty first describe these core motives and then discuss the relationship between motives and attitude change processes and, in conclusion, their implications for attitude strength.
Chapter ] 5: Communication and Attitude Change: Causes, Processes, and Effects (Johnson, Maio, & Smith-McLallen). For many decades, researchers of persuasion have amassed a great deal of knowledge about the impact of persuasive communica- tions on the attitudes of recipients. To the extent that communication has been one of the main paradigms in the study of attitude change, this research is covered in the context of chapters 3 to 11. In chapter 15, Blair Johnson, Greg Maio, and Aaron Smith-McLallen depict main points cutting across the different cells of the matrix and describe current and historical trends in communication and persuasion research. In line with the major theme of the handbook—the interrelations of key attitudinally relevant variables—the chapter examines: (a) the causes of communication-induced attitude change, including factors that relate to change at message exposure and to change following message exposure; (b) the effects of communication- induced attitude change on other variables like behavior; and (c) the processes by which communication-induced attitude change occurs and affects other variables. In each section, relevant theories and evidence are reviewed, followed by suggestions for future research.
Chapter 1 6: Social Influence in Attitudes and Attitude Change (Prislin & Wood). Attitudes are formed and persist in a cultural and social niche. In this chapter, Radmila Prislin and Wendy Wood review such issues in relation to the matrix in Table 1.1 and other factors. For example, normative beliefs are important determinants of attitudes as well as behavior. Such norms most likely reflect the cultural structure of the social environment and the interactions it contains (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Thus, individuals' attitudes, affect,
beliefs, and behavior have social correlates, both because they often derive from socially shared
information, and because they collectively influence social representations, rules, and actions.
Therefore, in addition to reviewing classic topics of social influence (e.g., minority and majority
influence, conformity), Prislin and Wood's chapter integrates social scientific knowledge that
is relevant to the handbook matrix.
Chapter I 7: Attitude Theory and Research: Intradiscipiinary and Interdis-
ciplinary Connections (Ottati, Edwards, &• Krumdick). In their chapter, Victor
Ottati, John Edwards, and Nathaniel Krumdick argue that many areas of study within and out-
side of social psychology are infused with and connected to attitudinal concepts and processes.
In exploring intradisciplinary connections between the attitude literature and other areas of
social psychology, the chapter focuses on intrapersonal processes (e.g., impression formation),
interpersonal processes (e.g., close relationships), intragroup processes (e.g., group decision
making), and intergroup processes (e.g., intergroup prejudice and discrimination). Within each
of these four domains, Ottati and colleagues also consider interdisciplinary connections to areas
falling outside of social psychology (e.g., political cognition, marital interaction, organizational
behavior, and stigma). Thus, the chapter proposes that attitudes are an integrative theme for understanding human behavior.
Chapter 18: Attitude Research in the 21st Century: The Current State of
Knowledge (Eagly & Chaiken). The main objective of the handbook is to review a
tradition of established knowledge in the area of attitudes and attitude change. In this final
chapter, Alice Eagly and Shelly Chaiken summarize this tradition, draw conclusions about the state of the attitude literature, and point to areas that need further development.
1 6 ALBARRACIN ET AL.
CONCLUSION
This handbook attests to the mass of scientific knowledge that has accrued about attitudes:
Here is what is now known and may be learned about seemingly all nuances of the attitudinal
phenomena. Yet the chapters also point to areas in which understanding can be improved
through enhancements of method and theory, which can benefit future studies of attitudes. By
casting an attitudes spotlight on human affect, cognition, and behavior, the chapters in this
handbook collectively show that attitudes remain and will continue to be an indispensable
construct with which to understand the human condition.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The writing of this chapter was supported in part by grants KOI-MHO 1861, R01-NR08325,
and R01-MH58563 from the National Institutes of Health.
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