What are attitudes?

The study of attitudes is both the most natural and the most dangerous point from which to start a book on social psychology. The term ‘attitude’ is probably used more frequently than any other in social psychology. There are few theories in which the concept is not explicitly or implicitly introduced, and few experiments in which attitudes are not involved somewhere among the dependent variables. But is it, as Allport (1935) once claimed, social psychology's most distinctive and indispensable concept?

At one level, we all have a rough idea of what attitudes are. To say that we have a certain attitude towards something or someone is a shorthand way of saying that we have feelings or thoughts of like or dislike, approval or disapproval, attraction or repulsion, trust or distrust and so on. Such feelings will tend to be reflected in what we say and do, and in how we react to what others say and do.

The difficulty is one of sorting out our various intuitions about attitudes into assumptions that are logically essential to the concept of attitude itself, as distinct from those that involve empirical predictions about how attitudes are related to other observable events. Kiesler, Collins and Miller (1969: 4) have said ‘all too often, social psychologists have tried to make their definition of attitude both a definition and a theory of the concept’.