Attitudes: Disposition, behaviour or evaluation?

Attitudes are conveniently conceptualized either as enduring internal affective or evaluative predispositions which have a causal influence on behaviour, or—less commonly—as behaviours in their own right. Conceptual and methodological problems with both of these formulations are discussed, and a reconceptualization is proposed in which attitudes are conceived of as communicative acts which imply evaluations of a class of objects, persons or events. The clearest case of attitude would be a self-referent speech act of the form, ‘I approve/disapprove entities of type X’. The study of attitude as an expressive communicative act makes use of speech act theory and theories of impression management and self-presentation, and requires an analysis of the context in which the attitude act occurs and the variety of personal and interpersonal functions which the act serves. The proposed reconceptualization eliminates the ‘attitude–behaviour’ problem and raises a number of potentially fruitful research issues, including the culturally grounded means for achieving of consistency.