Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The concept of the attitude has had a long and venerable history in social psychology. In his seminal chapter in the original Handbook of Social Psychology , Gordon Allport (1935) called the attitude, “probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology.” In all probability, it still is. At the very least, it is the most widely referenced concept in social psychology as the twentieth century draws to a close. It is interesting that it was not always so. According to Allport, before the attitude concept gained acceptance, there was no agreed upon way to represent preferences, sentiments, and values. But the growth of the attitude concept gave social psychologists a way to discuss and measure such preferences. Cantril (1934) defined attitude as “a more or less permanently enduring state of readiness of mental organization which predisposes an individual to react in a characteristic way to any object or situation with which it is related.” Current students of attitudes have generally conceived of attitudes in much the same way. Petty and Cacioppo (1996) , for example, refer to attitudes as “a general and enduring positive or negative feeling about some person, object, or issue” (p. 7). Despite the similarity in definitions of attitudes during the past seven decades, there have been interesting and subtle differences in the direction ... log in or subscribe to read full text