Attitude Theory

History

Attitude theory emerged in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. Until the 1960s, the field was dominated by consistency theories of attitude, a family of theories that share the basic motivational assumption that people strive for consistency. The most important ones are dissonance theory (Festinger 1957), balance theory (Heider 1958), and social judgment theory (also referred to as assimilation and contrast theory; Sherif and Hovland 1961). All consistency theories are dynamic and process-oriented, focusing on the mechanisms by which people achieve coherence between their cognitions, affective experiences, and behavior.

In the 1960s, a competing family of theories emerged that was closely related to economic models of rational choice and expectancy-value models of [Page 71]motivation: multiattribute theories of attitude. The historically most important one is Martin Fishbein's multi-attribute model, including its extended versions, the theories of reasoned action (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975) and planned behavior (Ajzen 1991). Most multiattribute theories are static and structure-oriented, focusing on the weights people assign to the different attributes of an attitude object when they form an overall evaluation of the object. The theories of reasoned action and planned behavior go a step farther, attempting to describe how beliefs about, and evaluations of, the outcomes of behaviors motivate intentions and actions.

Since the 1980s, social cognition theories of attitude have dominated the field. The most important ones are Russell Fazio's theory of object-evaluation associations (Fazio 1995), Eliot Smith's connectionist models of social cognition (Conrey and Smith 1997) and several integrative dual-process models of attitude and attitude change, for example the associative-propositional model of evaluation (Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2006). Common to all social cognition models is that they are formulated in the language of experimental psychology, a clear break with the “particularist” tradition of theorizing that was characteristic of social psychology until the 1980s.

Current State of the Art

Contemporary attitude theory provides generic models of how attitudes are formed and changed (through learning and reasoning mechanisms), how they are cognitively represented (in terms of memory structures and activation patterns), and how they relate to other psychological processes (perception, motivation, behavior). Many current approaches are based on a dual-system view of the human mind. The associative-propositional model distinguishes two systems. The associative system is evolutionarily older, operates quickly, automatically and without conscious effort, processes information in a parallel manner, is closely linked to the perceptual apparatus, learns relatively slowly by means of contiguity learning mechanisms, classical conditioning, and instrumental conditioning, and evaluates by means of “hot” affects. On confrontation with the attitude object, the object-evaluation associations stored in this system are automatically activated, manifesting themselves in immediate affective responses to the attitude object. The reasoning system is evolutionarily newer, processes information in a slow, deliberate, and serial manner, is limited by working memory capacity, is able to learn flexibly, and evaluates by means of “cold” propositional reasoning processes.

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