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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Prologue -- Chapter 1 What is an attitude and why is it important? -- What is an attitude? -- Why do people have attitudes? -- Organisation of knowledge, and regulating approach and avoidance -- Higher psychological needs -- Inter-individual differences and multiple functions -- Research applying attitude functions -- Why study attitudes? -- Overview of the book -- Chapter summary -- Exercises -- Further reading -- PART I GATEWAYS TO OUR ATTITUDES -- Chapter 2 Asking for attitudes: not that simple after all -- The concept of measurement

Since an att-object must always be encountered within some situation, about which we also have an att, soc behavior must be a function of at least 2 att's: att-toward-object (Ao) & att-towardsituation (As). Opinion expression & changes in opinion expression are both forms of verbal behavior &, thus, also functions of Ao & As. When a change of opinion is empirically found it may arise from a change in Ao, or As, or both, or neither. The classical paradigm of attitude change studies-pre-test, treatment, posttest-cannot ascertain which of these 4 possibilities produced the opinion change & must therefore be discarded. 3 new methods are then proposed for determining whether opinion change does or does not represent an attitude change: test for opinion change in at least 2 diff post-test situations; test for diff'ial change in several opinions in one post-test situation; test for behavioral changes accompanying opinion change. Illustrative res findings are cited. AA.

Surveys often ask respondents how information or events changed their attitudes. Does [information X] make you more or less supportive of [policy Y]? Does [scandal X] make you more or less likely to vote for [politician Y]? We show that this type of question (the change format) exhibits poor measurement properties, in large part because subjects engage in response substitution. When asked how their attitudes changed, people often report the level of their attitudes rather than the change in them. As an alternative, we propose the counterfactual format, which asks subjects what their attitude would have been in the counterfactual world in which they did not know the treatment information. Using a series of experiments embedded in four studies, we show that the counterfactual format greatly reduces bias relative to the change format.