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It is indisputable that collaboration between PO res & soc psychol is desirable & will benefit both disciplines. A necessary condition for this collaboration to be fruitful is that the collaborators show scholarship & the ability to think clearly. Several prominent psychol'ts have recently summarized the thinking & res now going on under the names of `cognitive dissonance,I 'congruity,' `cognitive balance,' etc, for the field of PO res. It is argued that the treatment meted out to the concept of `cognitive balance' as formulated by F. Heider is neither scholarly nor clear-thinking, hence the real significance of the concept is lost. An attempt is made to conceptualize clearly the concept of `cognitive balance' & the errors of the reviewers are pointed out & corrected. AA.

"Do social cohesion activities change the attitudes of the participants? This paper uses intergroup contact theory to explore attitude change resulting from contact with out-group(s) in social cohesion activities. Results from a pre-test/post-test design with fifty-five participants in two bicommunal camps in Cyprus show how attitudes change at the immediate end of these activities; an analysis of fourteen participants' comments after one, thirteen, and twenty-five months provides a medium- to long-term assessment of attitude change. Not all participants were completely positive towards the other community before they took part, as assumed by some. There is clearly space for impact in terms of attitude change. Social cohesion activities represent indispensable tools for reducing prejudice and improving relationships between former enemies in post-conflict countries." (author's abstract)

PurposeMany education for sustainable development (ESD) programs are designed to change attitudes and values toward the natural environment. However, psychological research indicates that several factors in addition to attitude influence behavior, including contextual support, social norms, action difficulty, and habitual behavior. Thus, if attitude change is to translate into altered behavior, education must extend beyond attitudes to assist people to act in ways consistent with their values. The purpose of this paper is to review the psychological research showing weak correlation between attitudes and behavior, the factors that mediate this relationship, and to describe the implications of these findings for university institutions and ESD programs.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is organized as a review and editorial article, describing relevant research, and outlining implications and suggested actions.FindingsThe results of the reviewed research indicate that attitude‐behavior correlations are mediated by several factors, including contextual conditions such as inconvenience and personal factors such as habits.Practical implicationsThe implications of these findings are that ESD programs should specifically address factors that mediate the attitude‐behavior relationship, including contextual changes and the development of personal management plans. Examples for each type of change are suggested.Originality/valueThe implications of these findings for ESD programs have not previously been highlighted. Specifically, to achieve sustainable development requires attention to these mediating factors as well as to knowledge generation and attitude change. Thus, the value of this paper is to encourage ESD developers to expand their programs to encourage contextual change and personal behavior management plans.

Based on their different conceptualizations of the processes evoked by role playing and issue importance in the induction of attitude change, cognitive dissonance, incentive, and social judgment theories make competing predictions on the relative effectiveness of role playing and passive exposure as a junction of issue importance. The experiment utilized a 3 × 2 design having control, passive-exposure, and role-playing conditions with low and high levels of issue importance. Planned comparisons of means in the cells expected to register maximal and minimal changes in attitudes under each theory provided little support for the dissonance position and fairly credible, though somewhat overlapping, evidence for incentive and social judgment theories. Other comparisons indicated that improvised role playing produced more change than did passive exposure only for the high- importance issue.

SignificancePeople change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others' changes. These misperceptions may bedevil people's efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones. For example, participants believed that Americans increasingly want to limit immigration, which they said justifies tighter borders. However, participants also said that limiting immigration would not be right if attitudes had shifted against it--which is what actually occurred. Our findings suggest that the national discourse around contentious social issues, policies resulting from that discourse, and perhaps the opinions that drive discourse in the first place would be very different if people better understood how attitudes have and have not changed.

In this paper we provide an overview of the most relevant research work on the simulation of attitudes which evolved in the late 90's and mainly after the year 2000. The general framework for the modeling, simulation and computational research on attitudes integrates research approaches (both fundamental and applicative) which combine theories from sociology, social psychology, social economics, political science, conflict theories, human-computer interaction areas with complexity theory, computer science, autonomous agents, artificial life, artificial intelligence, machine learning and decision making. One of the main dimensions is that of elaborating agent-based studies and simulations of the attitude dynamics.