Attitudes: Introduction and Scope

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 relations 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 organization 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