Attitudes and Opinions

Abstract

Attitudes and opinions" are a primary focus of attention throughout social psychology, and indeed throughout all of social science. To make our task manageable we have had to define the boundaries of our attention in terms of those set by the standard journals of social psychology; hence we do not deal with such interesting attitudinal matters as prejudice, mass communications, public opinion, or political socialization. Fortunately, recent and conscientious reviews of these topics are available; several chap ters in the revised Handbook of Social Psychology deal with such matters, as do Proshansky (190) and Tannenbaum & Greenberg (239). This restriction is in itself scarcely adequate; our perhaps too lengthy bibliography still cites less than half the relevant published material for this 3-year period. We have tried to devote the most space to those issues that have created the most attention, though wherever possible emphasizing issues on which debate has been focused rather than diffuse. This choice unfortunately maxi mized the probability of reporting confusion rather than clarification; hope fully, student readers will not be discouraged, realizing our sampling has biased the outcome in favor of confusion. SURVEYS OF THE ATTITUDE AREAThe most useful surveys of the area are destined to appear between our writing of this chapter and its appearance in print. Consequently, we have made no serious effort to review them; however, their preprints have circu lated widely, and a little advance advertising is not out of order.The first is the revised edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Lindzey and Aronson. This is due in 1968, in five volumes. William McGuire's chapter on "nature of attitudes and attitude change" is likely to lOur coverage spans the period from July 1965, where William J. McGuire ended his 1966 Armual Review chapter, through May 1968. Our debt to McGuire's example will be evident from the organization and content of this review. for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. 253 137 Annu. Rev. Psychol. 1969.20:253-288. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of California -San Francisco UCSF on 02/02/15. For personal use only. Quick links to online content Further ANNUAL REVIEWS 254 SEARS & ABELES be the standard source in this area for years to come. A little farther afield are chapters by Harding et at. (103) on prejudice and ethnic relations, Sears (214) on political behavior, and Weiss (256) on mass communications. Rele vant methodological chapters focus on experimentation (14), attitude mea· sUrement (209) , and computer simulation (1).The second has a name so long (Theories of Cognitive Consistency: A Sourcebook), so many editors (6) , so many chapters (84) and so many authors (68) that the worst fears of its alphabetically-first editor seem almost pre ordained: that it will come to be known more economically as "TOCCAS" by Abelson et at. (4) . If nothing else, it is an anatomical comedown for what in the past had been regarded as the hobgoblin of...

Reflecting on Six Decades of Selective Exposure Research: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities

“…Several subsequent reviews provided similarly pessimistic evaluations of selective exposure phenomena (McGuire, 1968;Sears, 1968;Sears & Abeles, 1969). Interestingly, not all evaluations of the selective exposure literature at this time were so skeptical.…”

PEOPLE OR PAPERWORK An Analysis of Influences upon Juvenile Court Personnel

“…An alternative interpretation, that people seek the opinions with which they agree, is not tenable. This literature has been reviewed elsewhere (Sears and Freedman, 1967;Freedman and Sears, 1965;Sears and Abeles, 1969).…”

On Generating Data in Communication Research1

“…This is evident in the literature on persuasion initiated by Hovland [19] and recently reviewed by Sears and Abeles [29]; in the work done on infor~ mation diffusion [28]; in research into small groups phenomena [15] including communication nets [30]; and in inquiries into psycholinguistic processes [13], as well as in ahnost all the studies in mass communication reviewed by Tannenbaum and Greenberg [33].…”