Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

Item

Title

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

Author

Lord, Charles G.

Research Area

Cognition and Emotions

Topic

Attitudes and Opinions

Abstract

Although Charles Darwin conceptualized attitudes as things that organisms do, many psychologists and laypeople today make the fundamental attribution error of conceptualizing attitudes as dispositions people have that make them do what they do. Recent attitudes research, however, has begun to explore the basic process by which people construct attitudes—a process that operates in the same way when answering general attitude questions as for any other evaluative response to an attitude object. In the basic evaluation process, the evaluator activates associations to the attitude object, perceives the implications of those associations, and bases evaluative responses at least in part on those implications. Instead of trying to measure a relatively stable disposition that predicts future behavior, the emerging research investigates influences on which associations get activated (e.g., chance, recency, and priming) and influences on how the activated associations are perceived (including subjective ease, the perceived source, and their perceived relevance). Interestingly, the two steps in the basic evaluation process parallel the two strategies that people use when they try to change their own attitudes. Emerging research directions that were suggested by conceptualizing attitudes as things people do, not what they have, include understanding the effects of evaluation goals on activating and perceiving associations, assessing attitude accuracy according to how adaptive are the attitudes that people take, and applying network theory to the basic evaluation process.

Related Essays

Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris

Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One's Thoughts (Psychology), Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine

Genetic Foundations of Attitude Formation (Political Science), Christian Kandler et al.

Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E. Tetlock

Identifier

etrds0019

extracted text

Attitude: Construction versus
Disposition
CHARLES G. LORD

Abstract
Although Charles Darwin conceptualized attitudes as things that organisms do,
many psychologists and laypeople today make the fundamental attribution error of
conceptualizing attitudes as dispositions people have that make them do what they
do. Recent attitudes research, however, has begun to explore the basic process by
which people construct attitudes—a process that operates in the same way when
answering general attitude questions as for any other evaluative response to an
attitude object. In the basic evaluation process, the evaluator activates associations to
the attitude object, perceives the implications of those associations, and bases evaluative responses at least in part on those implications. Instead of trying to measure
a relatively stable disposition that predicts future behavior, the emerging research
investigates influences on which associations get activated (e.g., chance, recency, and
priming) and influences on how the activated associations are perceived (including
subjective ease, the perceived source, and their perceived relevance). Interestingly,
the two steps in the basic evaluation process parallel the two strategies that people
use when they try to change their own attitudes. Emerging research directions that
were suggested by conceptualizing attitudes as things people do, not what they have,
include understanding the effects of evaluation goals on activating and perceiving
associations, assessing attitude accuracy according to how adaptive are the attitudes
that people take, and applying network theory to the basic evaluation process.

INTRODUCTION
Although the word “attitude” entered the English language in the early 1700s
(Fleming, 1967), the first major scholarly treatise in which the concept of attitude played a central role was Charles Darwin’s (1872/1955) Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin did not define the term, but he
used “attitude” consistently to describe things that people and animals do.
When a dog sees another dog at a distance, for instance, it “lowers its head,
generally crouches a little, or even lies down; that is, he takes the proper
attitude for concealing himself and for making a rush or spring” (Darwin,
1872/1955, p. 43). In those days, taking an attitude meant doing something
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

measurable that was positive or negative toward an attitude object. Organisms clearly constructed the attitudes that they took to cope with the contingencies of specific attitude objects in specific situations.
In the 1900s, psychologists started using the word “attitude” in a different way, to refer to a relatively stable disposition people have that makes
them do what they do. They viewed an attitude as “exerting a directive and
dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related” (Allport, 1935, p. 810). Viewed this way, attitudes could not have been constructed online, because the attitude came
first, and informed subsequent behavior. Even today, leading journals publish many articles in which attitudes are said to “guide,” “direct,” “drive,” or
“cause” people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Many contemporary psychology researchers and laypeople routinely commit the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977; Schwarz, 2006). They confuse something that people
do with something they have.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
This historical change in use of the word “attitude” affected the types
of research questions that psychologists asked. For almost a century,
researchers have tried to measure “attitude–behavior consistency.” The
investigators in approximately 1000 published studies asked participants
to report their attitudes toward an object and then let them treat that object
either favorably or unfavorably. This procedure seems reasonable when you
start from the assumption that people have a stable disposition that affects
their relevant actions. Finding better ways to measure that stable disposition
allows more confident prediction. It would be useful if people had within
them some directive force we could measure, that would allow us to know
in advance how they would vote, which products they would buy, and
whom they would fight. Despite these researchers’ best efforts, however,
answers to general attitude questions predicted only 16% of behavioral
variance (Wallace, Paulson, Lord, & Bond, 2005).
Many researchers reacted to this disappointing level of prediction by
asking additional and/or more specific attitude questions. These efforts
increased prediction, but predicted a smaller range of behaviors, with
increased costs of initial measurement. Other researchers distrusted participants’ answers to general attitude questions and used elaborate ruses
(Crosby, Bromley, & Saxe, 1980) or sophisticated computer techniques
(Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003) to measure attitudes. These indirect
or implicit measurement techniques often detect different dispositions
than the participants report when answering explicit attitude questions,
with implicit measures predicting better in some situations and explicit

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

3

measures predicting better in others (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2007;
Payne, Burkley, & Stokes, 2008).
Recently, however, some researchers have embraced the original conception of attitudes as describing something that people do rather than a stable
disposition they have that causes them to do what they do. With this different conception of “attitude” in mind, these researchers have begun asking
a different set of research questions. To understand this different research
agenda, consider the issue of predicting behavior from attitudes. If attitudes
are things that people do, then those 1000 studies of “attitude–behavior consistency” have been mislabeled. What actually happened in those studies was
that participants evaluated an attitude object twice, at two different times,
and usually in two different ways.
One evaluation typically consisted of reporting, on one or more scales, what
they thought their attitude was. The other evaluation typically consisted of
actions or intentions toward the same object. Participants might, for example,
report their attitudes toward politicians on attitude scales and later be asked
to donate money to a political action group. The researchers would call the
correlation between these two evaluations “attitude–behavior consistency.”
A more accurate operational term might be “evaluation–evaluation consistency.” The two evaluations are both measurable things that people do that
are favorable or unfavorable toward the attitude object. There is no need to
treat one of these evaluations as though it is different from the other, or to
claim that one of them measures an underlying disposition that affects the
other (Schwarz, 2006).
If we consider the two measures in studies of “attitude–behavior
consistency” to be two separate evaluations that use the same underlying
process, then we need to understand that process. We need to answer the
question: How do people evaluate? Recent research along these lines suggests that regardless of whether the specific evaluation includes answering
attitude questions or taking an action such as signing a petition, and people
use the same basic evaluation process.

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
BASIC EVALUATION PROCESS
In its simplest form, the basic evaluation process has two steps. First,
the to-be-evaluated object (e.g., “politicians”) activates a small number
of associations—not everything that is known about the object, but only
enough to go by (Sia, Lord, Blessum, Thomas, & Lepper, 1999; Wilson &
Hodges, 1992). The associations might be examples (members of congress),
characteristics (they are egotistical), actions (they give speeches), feelings

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

(they make me angry), one’s own actions (I protested the political convention), or anything else the person might connect with the attitude object
(Lord & Lepper, 1999). Associations are said to be activated or “come to
mind” when their heightened accessibility can be measured (e.g., by a lexical
decision task), even if the person is not consciously aware of the activation
(Higgins, 1996).
Second, the activated associations are perceived as implying favorable,
unfavorable, or neutral treatment of the attitude object, such as approach,
avoidance, help, or harm. Depending on situational factors, the perceived
implications might or might not result in a measurable response to the
attitude object. It is only through measurable responses that we can
detect “taking an attitude.” Nevertheless, researchers have developed
many methodologically sound ways to investigate both steps of the basic
evaluation process.
The basic evaluation process—activate associations and perceive their
implications—underlies all types of evaluations, whether completing an
attitude questionnaire or acting in any other measurable way that takes
an attitude toward an attitude object (Lord & Lepper, 1999; Schwarz &
Bohner, 2001; Tourangeau, 1992). An emerging understanding of this
process has sparked new research directions that start by assuming that
the attitudes people construct and take are flexible and adaptive. Completely random responding would not serve an organism well, but neither
would completely consistent responding. Fortunately, the basic evaluation
process has built into it two components that allow for adaptive attitude
flexibility. Attitude flexibility—evaluating the same object differently on
two separate occasions—is made possible both by changes in the associations that are activated and by changes in perceived implications of those
associations.

ACTIVATED ASSOCIATIONS
It has long been known that attitude change depends heavily, if not
exclusively, on the types of thoughts that people themselves generate
(Janis & King, 1954; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Self-generated thoughts take
precedence when people’s own thoughts conflict with what they are being
told (Briñol & Petty, 2003). Thus, the associations that come to mind have
considerable impact on how an attitude object is evaluated, and it is important to understand the factors that influence their activation. Relatively
recent research has shown that the subset of associations activated by an
attitude object on any given occasion can be affected by chance, by recency,
and by priming.

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

5

CHANCE
Spontaneous activation of associations is a probabilistic event. Even without changes in the attitude object itself, we would expect fluctuations from
one time to the next in which specific subset of possible associations gets
activated. When people are asked what vegetables, tools, or other natural
objects come to mind on two separate occasions, the probability that the same
associations will come to mind is less than 0.70 (Bellezza, 1984). When they
are asked what politicians, foreign leaders, or talk show hosts come to mind
on two separate occasions, the probability that the same ones will come to
mind is also less than 0.70 (Sia, Lord, Blessum, Ratcliff, & Lepper, 1997). For
many attitude objects, the activated associations differ spontaneously from
one occasion to the next. The same person will evaluate an attitude object
differently from one time to the next merely because associations of different
valence happen to come to mind (Lord & Lepper, 1999).
RECENCY
Beyond this baseline of spontaneous flexibility, though, people are sensitive
to subtle contextual cues that can alter which associations to an attitude object
get activated at any given time (Schwarz, 2007). One general principle is that
associations are more likely to get activated when they have come to mind
recently (Wyer & Srull, 1989). “Abraham Lincoln” and “Richard Nixon” may
each have a 0.05 chance of coming to mind when evaluating “politicians,” for
instance, but if only one of them comes to mind when evaluating politicians
today, then the likelihood of that same one coming to mind tomorrow is likely
to be increased beyond 0.05. If we visualize all possible associations to an
attitude object as forming a “push-down stack,” then an association activated
from the middle of the stack gets put back on the top of the stack, which
temporarily increases its probability of activation (Wyer & Srull, 1989). This
last-in-first-out principle might matter for evaluating “politicians,” because
most people would take a different attitude toward “politicians” if Lincoln
came to mind than if Nixon came to mind.
PRIMING
To show how flexible people can be in the attitudes that they take, consider
studies of priming effects (Loersch & Payne, 2012). In many studies, psychologists have experimentally increased the likelihood of activation for one versus another association by requiring that study participants think about one
of them immediately before evaluating the attitude object (Schwarz, 1999).
If you ask people how tall Abraham Lincoln was just before you ask them
to evaluate “politicians,” they will likely evaluate politicians more positively

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

than they would have had you not first got them thinking about Lincoln (Sia
et al., 1997).
These priming effects, in which researchers use subtle contextual cues to
increase the probability of activation for specific associations to an attitude
object, illustrate how finely people can tune their evaluations. Although it is
not always true that responses to an attitude object are more likely to be adaptive when you give greater importance to the last instance you encountered
than to an instance you have not encountered in a long time, more times than
not following the last-in-first out rule will be beneficial rather than harmful
(Schwarz, 2007).
PERCEIVED IMPLICATIONS OF THE ACTIVATED ASSOCIATIONS
If the basic evaluation process had only one step—activating associations to
the attitude object—then evaluations might follow invariably from the combined valence of the activated associations. Indeed, this is the usual outcome.
There are, however, exceptions to this general rule that highlight the importance of how the activated associations are perceived. The same associations
can be perceived as having either positive or negative implications for evaluating the attitude object depending on the subjective ease with which they
came to mind, their perceived source, and their perceived relevance to the
attitude object.
SUBJECTIVE EASE
The activation of associations to an attitude object carries with it more information than is contained in their valence. People who activate associations
get a feeling for how easily those associations came to mind, and this subjective ease or difficulty can have implications opposite to the valence of the
associations themselves. In a relevant study, German students named either 1
or 10 reasons for buying a BMW automobile (Wänke, Bohner, & Jurkowitsch,
1997). You might think that people who generated 10 positive associations to
an attitude object would take a more positive attitude toward it than people
generated only 1, but just the opposite was true. Students who had recently
generated 1 reason said they were more willing to buy a BMW than were
students who had recently generated 10 reasons.
These counterintuitive results occurred because the students found it relatively easy to generate 1 positive association—implying that BMWs must
have many positive attributes—whereas they found it relatively difficult to
generate 10 positive associations—implying that BMWs must have few positive attributes. The informational importance of subjective ease reinforces the

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

7

idea that people are sensitive and flexible in taking attitudes. Some dangerous activities have both positive and negative associations that might come to
mind, but avoiding them when the negative associations come more quickly
to mind than the positive ones is likely to prove adaptive in the long run.
PERCEIVED SOURCE
In perceiving implications of the activated associations, people are also sensitive to why they came to mind. The default assumption when we think of
something is that we made it happen. If we are evaluating “politicians,” for
instance, and “Romney” comes to mind, we tend to assume we thought of
Romney spontaneously. Studies of priming and context effects rely on this
assumption (Higgins, 1996). It would be unusual to suspect “I only thought
of Romney because I had recently answered a question about large corporations,” even when researchers can show empirically that this specific association had been experimentally primed.
Sometimes, though, the eternal influences become so obvious that we either
discount or react against the prime, perceiving implications exactly opposite
to the valence of the activated association. If we like Romney and conclude
that thoughts of Romney were forced on us, we might evaluate politicians
more negatively than otherwise—a contrast effect. When we are aware of
external influence on the associations that we generate, we tend to evaluate
the attitude object opposite to the valence of the activated associations (Bless
& Schwarz, 2010; Strack & Hannover, 1996).
PERCEIVED RELEVANCE
People also tend to assume that the activated associations are relevant to the
attitude object. When a disliked politician such as Nixon comes to mind, we
might consider him representative of “politicians,” which would imply an
unfavorable evaluation. This normal assumption suggests, however, that the
perceived implications of a particular association might be different if we
did not perceive it as representative of the attitude object—if, for instance,
we took Nixon to be so atypical and unrepresentative that he established a
standard to which other politicians should be compared.
People who evaluate an ambiguous politician are likely to treat that politician more favorably if they have recently been thinking about Adolph Hitler,
compared to whom the politician in question might look like a statesman,
than if they have recently been thinking about Franklin Roosevelt, compared
to whom the politician in question might look like a political hack (Bless &
Schwarz, 2010).

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

PARALLELS IN DELIBERATE SELF-PERSUASION
This description has highlighted two principles of the basic evaluation process that allow people to take flexible, adaptive attitudes. First, if people
usually activate only a subset of all their possible associations to the attitude
object, they might be able to control which specific associations get activated
at any given time to give preference to the ones most likely to be useful on
that occasion. Second, if people can perceive the same associations as having
different valence, they might be able to modify those perceptions so as to take
desired rather than undesired attitudes.
Interestingly, research on deliberate self-persuasion has shown that,
although people may not be consciously aware of when or why they are
doing it, they use the same two principles when they try deliberately to
change their own attitudes (Maio & Thomas, 2007). People who want to
take a more positive attitude toward their lives, their spouses, their jobs, or
themselves do it by controlling which associations get activated and/or by
altering implications of the activated associations. People who want to take
a less positive attitude toward self-detrimental behaviors such as smoking,
binge drinking, or overeating also do it by controlling which associations
get activated and/or by altering the perceived evaluative implications of the
associations that get activated.
Many people have successfully changed the attitudes that they take toward
important attitude objects by using one or both of these two strategies that
attack the two components of the basic evaluation process. To change which
associations get activated, people concentrate on the associations they want
to be activated, preempt unwanted associations, suppress unwanted associations, and/or distract themselves by thinking about something else (Maio
& Thomas, 2007). These tactics are not always successful (Wegner, 1994), but
they all involve efforts to intervene in the activation part of the process, without necessarily working on their evaluative implications.
To change perceived implications of the associations that get activated,
people interpret activated associations to be more in line with their desired
attitude, convince themselves that undesired associations also have desired
attributes, try to explain away undesired associations, question their validity,
adopt new standards of comparison, and/or convince themselves that the
undesired associations are relatively unimportant (Maio & Thomas, 2007).
Again, these tactics are not always successful, but they all involve efforts
to intervene in the part of the process that involves perceiving different
implications of the activated associations, without necessarily working on
the activation process itself.
The striking parallels between how the basic evaluation process works and
how people deliberately change their own attitudes suggest that research on

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

9

the basic evaluation process has identified two important components of how
people successfully navigate a complex animate and inanimate environment.
By working on the two components of the basic evaluation process, people
can take positive attitudes toward objects beneficial to them, and can also
take negative attitudes toward objects detrimental to them.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Conceiving of attitudes as things that people do also offers the prospect of
exciting new research avenues that might not have been pursued otherwise.
One direction, just described, involves investigating parallels between the
basic evaluation process and deliberate self-persuasion. Other possible directions for future research include goals, accuracy, and networks.
ATTITUDE GOALS
The way Darwin used the term “attitude” involved a readiness for action. In
Darwin’s example quoted earlier, a dog who spots another dog at a distance
might take an attitude equally useful for concealment, attack, or defense.
Most times, we evaluate attitude objects for a purpose, because accurate evaluation is inherently adaptive. To quote William James (1890, p. 333), “My
thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.” It seems reasonable to assume, then, that aspects of the basic evaluation process might
be affected by attitude goals. As one example, different associations might be
activated depending on the goal of the moment.
When considering a political nominee who has worked for lobbying firms,
thoughts of politicians who have been involved in influence peddling might
be especially useful, come readily to mind, and suggest taking a negative
attitude. When considering a politician who might become the first woman
President, in contrast, activating thoughts of male politicians who have been
involved in sex scandals might be especially useful, come readily to mind,
and suggest taking a positive attitude. In both cases, the associations most
likely to be activated would be those most relevant to the specific evaluation
(Gonsalkorale, Sherman, Allen, Klauer, & Amodio, 2011).
Similarly, holding the associations that are activated constant, goals might
affect how those associations are perceived. Activating thoughts of a politician telling jokes on late night TV might carry different implications for inviting him to dinner than for supporting him as leader of the country. People are
often biased in how they perceive new information about an attitude object
(Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979), so it seems plausible that they might also be
biased by their goals in how they perceive old information that they brought
to mind in the service of accurate evaluation.

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

ATTITUDE ACCURACY
The adaptive importance of evaluation suggests also a need for further
research on attitude accuracy. If an attitude is conceived as something
people do, not something they have, then they can do it well, but they can
also do it poorly. They can pick up a poisonous snake whose bright colors
activated thoughts of Mardi Gras, or invest their life savings with a swindler
whose beard activated thoughts of Honest Abe. People are not always
accurate in their evaluations, and evaluation errors might reasonably be
traced to one or the other steps within the basic evaluation process.
Cognitive processes are “situated” in that they are influenced by the
situation in which they occur (Barsalou, 2005; Smith & Semin, 2004), and
the basic evaluation process is no exception. Some people might be better
than others in activating the right number of associations—not too few and
not too many—or at activating relevant rather than irrelevant associations.
One of the benefits of experience with an attitude object, in fact, might be
improvement at activating associations useful for the evaluative goal of the
moment. Fortunately, the basic evaluation process is malleable rather than
fixed (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995). People can learn to manage the process
so that they take more adaptive attitudes.
Attitude accuracy should be assessed not as answering attitude questions
in ways that predict future behavior, but instead as accuracy in taking adaptive attitudes—treating attitude objects in ways that are beneficial rather than
detrimental to the evaluator. People can be wrong when they report their own
attitudes. If they happen to activate unusual associations when completing
the psychologist’s attitude scales, then they can easily report “having” an
attitude that is deviant from the attitude that they usually take. It is currently
unclear what aspects of the basic evaluative process promote versus inhibit
accuracy, although we might speculate that factors such as ability to control cognitive associations and giving appropriate weight to subjective ease,
perceived source, and perceived relevance might prove important.

ATTITUDE NETWORKS
As described, the possible associations to an attitude object differ in their
probability of being activated during the basic evaluation process, but they
are also interdependent. A citizen who is deciding how to vote on a state referendum making it easier to recall office holders might activate associations
to both political sex scandals and political bribes. Activating instances of one
increases the likelihood that the other association of the same type will also
be activated, because cognitive associations operate on a network principle
(Smith & Queller, 2004).

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

11

When people activate cognitive associations, they tend to do so in clusters of interrelated ideas. Thus, network theory offers potential insights into
the basic evaluation process. The Internet, epidemics, power grids, scientific collaborations, and brain neurons all have network structures that differ in their density, transitivity, reciprocity, clustering, and other measurable
network properties (Newman, 2010). Similarly, individual nodes within networks differ in their centrality, closeness, similarity, and other measurable
properties (Newman, 2010). These network metrics could be used to examine more precisely the activation of associations that occur as part of the basic
evaluation process (Bressler & Menon, 2010). In addition, network analyses
could enhance understanding of changes in the associative network that correspond with changes in evaluating an attitude object (Boyasso, Loran, &
Vincent, 1993; Smith & DeCoster, 1998).
Finally, activation of associations from a cognitive network may be not
just probabilistic, but also somewhat chaotic—a desirable, adaptive feature.
Human hearts are more resistant to disease when heartbeats are slightly
chaotic rather than perfectly regular (Goldberger, 1996). Similarly, brain
waves during sleep and spontaneous firings of brain neurons are more
adaptive when they are slightly chaotic rather than perfectly rhythmic
(Golbin & Umantsev, 2006). Nature tends to favor unpredictable variation
over absolute predictability (Bak, 1996), so it is possible that this aspect of
the basic evaluation process—cross-temporal variation in the spontaneous
associations that come to mind for an attitude object—might provide
adaptive flexibility in the attitudes that people construct and take.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Because the high-probability associations to an attitude object are, by definition, likely to be activated across times and situations, and because their
evaluative implications usually change only slowly, the attitudes that people
take are likely to be reasonably stable. Because activation of specific associations to an attitude object is probabilistic and possibly chaotic, and sensitive
and flexible enough to reflect subtle changes in the social or nonsocial context, the attitudes that people take are also likely to vary in ways that are
usually adaptive. The way the system works is probably preferable to having organisms with relatively stable dispositions that somehow cause them
to do what they do. Even if conceptualizing attitudes as stable dispositions
did not constitute what Ross (1977) called the fundamental attribution error
(see also Ryle, 1949; Schwarz, 2006), conceptualizing attitudes as things people and animals do has already informed exciting research programs and will
inspire future research.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

REFERENCES
Allport, G. W. (1935). Attitudes. In C. Murchison (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology
(pp. 798–844). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
Bak, P. (1996). How nature works. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Situated conceptualization. In H. Cohen & C. Lefebvre (Eds.),
Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (pp. 619–650). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.
Bellezza, F. S. V. (1984). Reliability of retrieval from semantic memory: Common categories. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 22, 324–327.
Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation
and contrast effects: The inclusion/exclusion model. Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, 42, 319–373. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(10)42006-7
Boyasso, G. S., Loran, B., & Vincent, S. M. (1993). A graph theory model of the semantic structure of attitudes. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 411–425.
Bressler, S. L., & Menon, V. (2010). Large-scale brain networks in cognition: Emerging methods and principles. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 277–290. doi:10.1016/
j.tics.2010.04.004
Briñol, P., & Petty, R. E. (2003). Overt head movements and persuasion: A
self-validation analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1123–1139.
doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.6.1123
Crosby, F., Bromley, S., & Saxe, L. (1980). Recent unobtrusive studies of black and
white discrimination and prejudice: A literature review. Psychological Bulletin, 87,
546–563. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.87.3.546
Darwin, C. (1872/1955). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. New York,
NY: Philosophical Library.
Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments
and reactions: A word from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 267–285.
Fleming, D. (1967). Attitude: The history of a concept. Perspectives in American
History, 1, 287–365.
Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2007). Unraveling the processes underlying
evaluation: Attitudes from the perspective of the APE model. Social Cognition, 25,
687–717. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.687
Golbin, A., & Umantsev, A. (2006). Adaptive chaos: Mild disorder may help contain
major disease. Medical Hypotheses, 66, 182–187. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2005.06.031
Goldberger, A. L. (1996). Non-linear dynamics for clinicians: Chaos theory, fractals,
abd complexity at the bedside. Lancet, 347, 1312–1314. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736
(96)90948-4
Gonsalkorale, K., Sherman, J. W., Allen, T. J., Klauer, K. C., & Amodio, D. M. (2011).
Accounting for successful control of implicit racial bias: The roles of association
activation, response monitoring, and overcoming bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1534–1545. doi:10.1177/0146167211414064
Greenwald, A. G., Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003). Understanding and using the
implicit association test: I. An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.197

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

13

Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience.
In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133–168). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York, NY: Dover.
Janis, I. L., & King, B. T. (1954). The influence of role playing on opinion change.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 211–218. doi:10.1037/h0056957
Loersch, C., & Payne, B. K. (2012). On mental contamination: The role of
(mis)attribution in behavior priming. Social Cognition, 30, 241–252.
Lord, C. G., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Attitude representation theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 265–343. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60275-0
Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude
polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 2098–2109. doi:10.1037/00223514.37.11.2098
Maio, G. R., & Thomas, G. (2007). The epistemic-teleologic model of deliberate
self-persuasion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 46–67. doi:10.1177/
1088868306294589
Newman, M. E. J. (2010). Networks: An introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Payne, B. K., Burkley, M. A., & Stokes, M. B. (2008). Why do implicit and explicit
attitude tests diverge? The role of structural fit. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 94, 16–31. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.16
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion.
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 124–205.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the
attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173–220.
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London, England: Hutchison.
Schwarz, N. (1999). Self reports: How the questions shape the answers. American
Psychologist, 54, 93–105.
Schwarz, N. (2006). Attitude research: Between Ockham’s razor and the fundamental attribution error. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 19–21.
Schwarz, N. (2007). Attitude construction: Evaluation in context. Social Cognition, 25,
638–656. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.638
Schwarz, N., & Bohner, G. (2001). The construction of attitudes. In A. Tesser &
N. Schwarz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of basic principles: Intraindividual processes
(pp. 436–457). Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Sia, T. L., Lord, C. G., Blessum, K. A., Ratcliff, C. D., & Lepper, M. R. (1997). Is a rose
always a rose? The role of social category exemplar change in attitude stability
and attitude-behavior consistency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72,
501–514. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.3.501
Sia, T. L., Lord, C. G., Blessum, K. A., Thomas, J. C., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Activation of exemplars in the process of assessing social-category attitudes. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 517–532. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.76.4.517

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Smith, E. R., & DeCoster, J. (1998). Knowledge acquisition, accessibility, and use
in person perception and stereotyping: Simulation with a recurrent connectionist network. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 21–35. doi:10.1037/
0022-3514.74.1.21
Smith, E. R., & Queller, S. (2004). Mental representations. In M. B. Brewer & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Social cognition. Perspectives on social psychology (pp. 5–27). Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Smith, E. R., & Semin, G. R. (2004). Socially situated cognition: Cognition in its social
context. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 53–117.
Strack, F., & Hannover, B. (1996). Awareness of influence as a precondition for implementing correctional goals. In P. M. Gollwitzer & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology
of action: Linking cognition and motivation to behavior (pp. 579–596). New York, NY:
Guilford Press.
Tourangeau, R. (1992). Attitudes as memory structures: Belief sampling and context
effects. In N. Schwarz & S. Sudman (Eds.), Context effects in social and psychological
research (pp. 35–47). New York, NY: Springer Verlag.
Wallace, D. S., Paulson, R. M., Lord, C. G., & Bond, C. F., Jr. (2005). Which behaviors
do attitudes predict? Meta-analyzing the effects of social pressure and perceived
difficulty. Review of General Psychology, 9, 214–227. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.9.3.214
Wänke, M., Bohner, G., & Jurkowitz, A. (1997). There are many reasons to drive a
BMW: Does imagined ease of argument generation influence attitudes? Journal of
Consumer Research, 7, 299–322. doi:10.1086/209502
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101,
34–52. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34
Wilson, T. D., & Hodges, S. D. (1992). Attitudes as temporary constructions. In L. L.
Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.), The construction of social judgments (pp. 37–65). Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Wyer, R. S., & Srull, T. K. (1989). Memory and cognition in its social context.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

FURTHER READING
Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation and contrast effects: The inclusion/exclusion model. Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, 42, 319–373. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(10)42006-7
Lord, C. G., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Attitude representation theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 265–343. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60275-0
Maio, G. R., & Thomas, G. (2007). The epistemic-teleologic model of deliberate
self-persuasion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 46–67. doi:10.1177/
1088868306294589
Newman, M. E. J. (2010). Networks: An introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Schwarz, N. (2007). Attitude construction: Evaluation in context. Social Cognition, 25,
638–656. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.638
Smith, E. R., & Semin, G. R. (2004). Socially situated cognition: Cognition in its social
context. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 53–117.

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

15

CHARLES G. LORD SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Charles G. Lord earned a BA from the University of Rhode Island in 1976
and a PhD from Stanford University in 1980. His first academic position was
at Princeton University, where he served as an Assistant Professor from 1980
to 1987. From Princeton, he went to Texas Christian University in 1987, with
the rank of Associate Professor. He served as Chair of the Department of
Psychology at TCU from 1990 to 1994, and was promoted to Full Professor in
1992. During his career at TCU, he served as Associate Editor of the journal
Social Cognition for 12 years and served on the National Science Foundation
social psychology panel for 3 years. After another turn as department chair in
2001, he became Director of Graduate Studies for the psychology department
at TCU. During his career so far, he has mentored 23 successful PhD students,
and is currently mentoring 5 more. Over the past 33 years, his research has
continued to investigate attitude processes.
RELATED ESSAYS
Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Genetic Foundations of Attitude Formation (Political Science), Christian
Kandler et al.
Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E.
Tetlock



Attitude: Construction versus
Disposition
CHARLES G. LORD

Abstract
Although Charles Darwin conceptualized attitudes as things that organisms do,
many psychologists and laypeople today make the fundamental attribution error of
conceptualizing attitudes as dispositions people have that make them do what they
do. Recent attitudes research, however, has begun to explore the basic process by
which people construct attitudes—a process that operates in the same way when
answering general attitude questions as for any other evaluative response to an
attitude object. In the basic evaluation process, the evaluator activates associations to
the attitude object, perceives the implications of those associations, and bases evaluative responses at least in part on those implications. Instead of trying to measure
a relatively stable disposition that predicts future behavior, the emerging research
investigates influences on which associations get activated (e.g., chance, recency, and
priming) and influences on how the activated associations are perceived (including
subjective ease, the perceived source, and their perceived relevance). Interestingly,
the two steps in the basic evaluation process parallel the two strategies that people
use when they try to change their own attitudes. Emerging research directions that
were suggested by conceptualizing attitudes as things people do, not what they have,
include understanding the effects of evaluation goals on activating and perceiving
associations, assessing attitude accuracy according to how adaptive are the attitudes
that people take, and applying network theory to the basic evaluation process.

INTRODUCTION
Although the word “attitude” entered the English language in the early 1700s
(Fleming, 1967), the first major scholarly treatise in which the concept of attitude played a central role was Charles Darwin’s (1872/1955) Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin did not define the term, but he
used “attitude” consistently to describe things that people and animals do.
When a dog sees another dog at a distance, for instance, it “lowers its head,
generally crouches a little, or even lies down; that is, he takes the proper
attitude for concealing himself and for making a rush or spring” (Darwin,
1872/1955, p. 43). In those days, taking an attitude meant doing something
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

measurable that was positive or negative toward an attitude object. Organisms clearly constructed the attitudes that they took to cope with the contingencies of specific attitude objects in specific situations.
In the 1900s, psychologists started using the word “attitude” in a different way, to refer to a relatively stable disposition people have that makes
them do what they do. They viewed an attitude as “exerting a directive and
dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related” (Allport, 1935, p. 810). Viewed this way, attitudes could not have been constructed online, because the attitude came
first, and informed subsequent behavior. Even today, leading journals publish many articles in which attitudes are said to “guide,” “direct,” “drive,” or
“cause” people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Many contemporary psychology researchers and laypeople routinely commit the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977; Schwarz, 2006). They confuse something that people
do with something they have.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
This historical change in use of the word “attitude” affected the types
of research questions that psychologists asked. For almost a century,
researchers have tried to measure “attitude–behavior consistency.” The
investigators in approximately 1000 published studies asked participants
to report their attitudes toward an object and then let them treat that object
either favorably or unfavorably. This procedure seems reasonable when you
start from the assumption that people have a stable disposition that affects
their relevant actions. Finding better ways to measure that stable disposition
allows more confident prediction. It would be useful if people had within
them some directive force we could measure, that would allow us to know
in advance how they would vote, which products they would buy, and
whom they would fight. Despite these researchers’ best efforts, however,
answers to general attitude questions predicted only 16% of behavioral
variance (Wallace, Paulson, Lord, & Bond, 2005).
Many researchers reacted to this disappointing level of prediction by
asking additional and/or more specific attitude questions. These efforts
increased prediction, but predicted a smaller range of behaviors, with
increased costs of initial measurement. Other researchers distrusted participants’ answers to general attitude questions and used elaborate ruses
(Crosby, Bromley, & Saxe, 1980) or sophisticated computer techniques
(Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003) to measure attitudes. These indirect
or implicit measurement techniques often detect different dispositions
than the participants report when answering explicit attitude questions,
with implicit measures predicting better in some situations and explicit

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

3

measures predicting better in others (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2007;
Payne, Burkley, & Stokes, 2008).
Recently, however, some researchers have embraced the original conception of attitudes as describing something that people do rather than a stable
disposition they have that causes them to do what they do. With this different conception of “attitude” in mind, these researchers have begun asking
a different set of research questions. To understand this different research
agenda, consider the issue of predicting behavior from attitudes. If attitudes
are things that people do, then those 1000 studies of “attitude–behavior consistency” have been mislabeled. What actually happened in those studies was
that participants evaluated an attitude object twice, at two different times,
and usually in two different ways.
One evaluation typically consisted of reporting, on one or more scales, what
they thought their attitude was. The other evaluation typically consisted of
actions or intentions toward the same object. Participants might, for example,
report their attitudes toward politicians on attitude scales and later be asked
to donate money to a political action group. The researchers would call the
correlation between these two evaluations “attitude–behavior consistency.”
A more accurate operational term might be “evaluation–evaluation consistency.” The two evaluations are both measurable things that people do that
are favorable or unfavorable toward the attitude object. There is no need to
treat one of these evaluations as though it is different from the other, or to
claim that one of them measures an underlying disposition that affects the
other (Schwarz, 2006).
If we consider the two measures in studies of “attitude–behavior
consistency” to be two separate evaluations that use the same underlying
process, then we need to understand that process. We need to answer the
question: How do people evaluate? Recent research along these lines suggests that regardless of whether the specific evaluation includes answering
attitude questions or taking an action such as signing a petition, and people
use the same basic evaluation process.

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
BASIC EVALUATION PROCESS
In its simplest form, the basic evaluation process has two steps. First,
the to-be-evaluated object (e.g., “politicians”) activates a small number
of associations—not everything that is known about the object, but only
enough to go by (Sia, Lord, Blessum, Thomas, & Lepper, 1999; Wilson &
Hodges, 1992). The associations might be examples (members of congress),
characteristics (they are egotistical), actions (they give speeches), feelings

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

(they make me angry), one’s own actions (I protested the political convention), or anything else the person might connect with the attitude object
(Lord & Lepper, 1999). Associations are said to be activated or “come to
mind” when their heightened accessibility can be measured (e.g., by a lexical
decision task), even if the person is not consciously aware of the activation
(Higgins, 1996).
Second, the activated associations are perceived as implying favorable,
unfavorable, or neutral treatment of the attitude object, such as approach,
avoidance, help, or harm. Depending on situational factors, the perceived
implications might or might not result in a measurable response to the
attitude object. It is only through measurable responses that we can
detect “taking an attitude.” Nevertheless, researchers have developed
many methodologically sound ways to investigate both steps of the basic
evaluation process.
The basic evaluation process—activate associations and perceive their
implications—underlies all types of evaluations, whether completing an
attitude questionnaire or acting in any other measurable way that takes
an attitude toward an attitude object (Lord & Lepper, 1999; Schwarz &
Bohner, 2001; Tourangeau, 1992). An emerging understanding of this
process has sparked new research directions that start by assuming that
the attitudes people construct and take are flexible and adaptive. Completely random responding would not serve an organism well, but neither
would completely consistent responding. Fortunately, the basic evaluation
process has built into it two components that allow for adaptive attitude
flexibility. Attitude flexibility—evaluating the same object differently on
two separate occasions—is made possible both by changes in the associations that are activated and by changes in perceived implications of those
associations.

ACTIVATED ASSOCIATIONS
It has long been known that attitude change depends heavily, if not
exclusively, on the types of thoughts that people themselves generate
(Janis & King, 1954; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Self-generated thoughts take
precedence when people’s own thoughts conflict with what they are being
told (Briñol & Petty, 2003). Thus, the associations that come to mind have
considerable impact on how an attitude object is evaluated, and it is important to understand the factors that influence their activation. Relatively
recent research has shown that the subset of associations activated by an
attitude object on any given occasion can be affected by chance, by recency,
and by priming.

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

5

CHANCE
Spontaneous activation of associations is a probabilistic event. Even without changes in the attitude object itself, we would expect fluctuations from
one time to the next in which specific subset of possible associations gets
activated. When people are asked what vegetables, tools, or other natural
objects come to mind on two separate occasions, the probability that the same
associations will come to mind is less than 0.70 (Bellezza, 1984). When they
are asked what politicians, foreign leaders, or talk show hosts come to mind
on two separate occasions, the probability that the same ones will come to
mind is also less than 0.70 (Sia, Lord, Blessum, Ratcliff, & Lepper, 1997). For
many attitude objects, the activated associations differ spontaneously from
one occasion to the next. The same person will evaluate an attitude object
differently from one time to the next merely because associations of different
valence happen to come to mind (Lord & Lepper, 1999).
RECENCY
Beyond this baseline of spontaneous flexibility, though, people are sensitive
to subtle contextual cues that can alter which associations to an attitude object
get activated at any given time (Schwarz, 2007). One general principle is that
associations are more likely to get activated when they have come to mind
recently (Wyer & Srull, 1989). “Abraham Lincoln” and “Richard Nixon” may
each have a 0.05 chance of coming to mind when evaluating “politicians,” for
instance, but if only one of them comes to mind when evaluating politicians
today, then the likelihood of that same one coming to mind tomorrow is likely
to be increased beyond 0.05. If we visualize all possible associations to an
attitude object as forming a “push-down stack,” then an association activated
from the middle of the stack gets put back on the top of the stack, which
temporarily increases its probability of activation (Wyer & Srull, 1989). This
last-in-first-out principle might matter for evaluating “politicians,” because
most people would take a different attitude toward “politicians” if Lincoln
came to mind than if Nixon came to mind.
PRIMING
To show how flexible people can be in the attitudes that they take, consider
studies of priming effects (Loersch & Payne, 2012). In many studies, psychologists have experimentally increased the likelihood of activation for one versus another association by requiring that study participants think about one
of them immediately before evaluating the attitude object (Schwarz, 1999).
If you ask people how tall Abraham Lincoln was just before you ask them
to evaluate “politicians,” they will likely evaluate politicians more positively

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

than they would have had you not first got them thinking about Lincoln (Sia
et al., 1997).
These priming effects, in which researchers use subtle contextual cues to
increase the probability of activation for specific associations to an attitude
object, illustrate how finely people can tune their evaluations. Although it is
not always true that responses to an attitude object are more likely to be adaptive when you give greater importance to the last instance you encountered
than to an instance you have not encountered in a long time, more times than
not following the last-in-first out rule will be beneficial rather than harmful
(Schwarz, 2007).
PERCEIVED IMPLICATIONS OF THE ACTIVATED ASSOCIATIONS
If the basic evaluation process had only one step—activating associations to
the attitude object—then evaluations might follow invariably from the combined valence of the activated associations. Indeed, this is the usual outcome.
There are, however, exceptions to this general rule that highlight the importance of how the activated associations are perceived. The same associations
can be perceived as having either positive or negative implications for evaluating the attitude object depending on the subjective ease with which they
came to mind, their perceived source, and their perceived relevance to the
attitude object.
SUBJECTIVE EASE
The activation of associations to an attitude object carries with it more information than is contained in their valence. People who activate associations
get a feeling for how easily those associations came to mind, and this subjective ease or difficulty can have implications opposite to the valence of the
associations themselves. In a relevant study, German students named either 1
or 10 reasons for buying a BMW automobile (Wänke, Bohner, & Jurkowitsch,
1997). You might think that people who generated 10 positive associations to
an attitude object would take a more positive attitude toward it than people
generated only 1, but just the opposite was true. Students who had recently
generated 1 reason said they were more willing to buy a BMW than were
students who had recently generated 10 reasons.
These counterintuitive results occurred because the students found it relatively easy to generate 1 positive association—implying that BMWs must
have many positive attributes—whereas they found it relatively difficult to
generate 10 positive associations—implying that BMWs must have few positive attributes. The informational importance of subjective ease reinforces the

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

7

idea that people are sensitive and flexible in taking attitudes. Some dangerous activities have both positive and negative associations that might come to
mind, but avoiding them when the negative associations come more quickly
to mind than the positive ones is likely to prove adaptive in the long run.
PERCEIVED SOURCE
In perceiving implications of the activated associations, people are also sensitive to why they came to mind. The default assumption when we think of
something is that we made it happen. If we are evaluating “politicians,” for
instance, and “Romney” comes to mind, we tend to assume we thought of
Romney spontaneously. Studies of priming and context effects rely on this
assumption (Higgins, 1996). It would be unusual to suspect “I only thought
of Romney because I had recently answered a question about large corporations,” even when researchers can show empirically that this specific association had been experimentally primed.
Sometimes, though, the eternal influences become so obvious that we either
discount or react against the prime, perceiving implications exactly opposite
to the valence of the activated association. If we like Romney and conclude
that thoughts of Romney were forced on us, we might evaluate politicians
more negatively than otherwise—a contrast effect. When we are aware of
external influence on the associations that we generate, we tend to evaluate
the attitude object opposite to the valence of the activated associations (Bless
& Schwarz, 2010; Strack & Hannover, 1996).
PERCEIVED RELEVANCE
People also tend to assume that the activated associations are relevant to the
attitude object. When a disliked politician such as Nixon comes to mind, we
might consider him representative of “politicians,” which would imply an
unfavorable evaluation. This normal assumption suggests, however, that the
perceived implications of a particular association might be different if we
did not perceive it as representative of the attitude object—if, for instance,
we took Nixon to be so atypical and unrepresentative that he established a
standard to which other politicians should be compared.
People who evaluate an ambiguous politician are likely to treat that politician more favorably if they have recently been thinking about Adolph Hitler,
compared to whom the politician in question might look like a statesman,
than if they have recently been thinking about Franklin Roosevelt, compared
to whom the politician in question might look like a political hack (Bless &
Schwarz, 2010).

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

PARALLELS IN DELIBERATE SELF-PERSUASION
This description has highlighted two principles of the basic evaluation process that allow people to take flexible, adaptive attitudes. First, if people
usually activate only a subset of all their possible associations to the attitude
object, they might be able to control which specific associations get activated
at any given time to give preference to the ones most likely to be useful on
that occasion. Second, if people can perceive the same associations as having
different valence, they might be able to modify those perceptions so as to take
desired rather than undesired attitudes.
Interestingly, research on deliberate self-persuasion has shown that,
although people may not be consciously aware of when or why they are
doing it, they use the same two principles when they try deliberately to
change their own attitudes (Maio & Thomas, 2007). People who want to
take a more positive attitude toward their lives, their spouses, their jobs, or
themselves do it by controlling which associations get activated and/or by
altering implications of the activated associations. People who want to take
a less positive attitude toward self-detrimental behaviors such as smoking,
binge drinking, or overeating also do it by controlling which associations
get activated and/or by altering the perceived evaluative implications of the
associations that get activated.
Many people have successfully changed the attitudes that they take toward
important attitude objects by using one or both of these two strategies that
attack the two components of the basic evaluation process. To change which
associations get activated, people concentrate on the associations they want
to be activated, preempt unwanted associations, suppress unwanted associations, and/or distract themselves by thinking about something else (Maio
& Thomas, 2007). These tactics are not always successful (Wegner, 1994), but
they all involve efforts to intervene in the activation part of the process, without necessarily working on their evaluative implications.
To change perceived implications of the associations that get activated,
people interpret activated associations to be more in line with their desired
attitude, convince themselves that undesired associations also have desired
attributes, try to explain away undesired associations, question their validity,
adopt new standards of comparison, and/or convince themselves that the
undesired associations are relatively unimportant (Maio & Thomas, 2007).
Again, these tactics are not always successful, but they all involve efforts
to intervene in the part of the process that involves perceiving different
implications of the activated associations, without necessarily working on
the activation process itself.
The striking parallels between how the basic evaluation process works and
how people deliberately change their own attitudes suggest that research on

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

9

the basic evaluation process has identified two important components of how
people successfully navigate a complex animate and inanimate environment.
By working on the two components of the basic evaluation process, people
can take positive attitudes toward objects beneficial to them, and can also
take negative attitudes toward objects detrimental to them.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Conceiving of attitudes as things that people do also offers the prospect of
exciting new research avenues that might not have been pursued otherwise.
One direction, just described, involves investigating parallels between the
basic evaluation process and deliberate self-persuasion. Other possible directions for future research include goals, accuracy, and networks.
ATTITUDE GOALS
The way Darwin used the term “attitude” involved a readiness for action. In
Darwin’s example quoted earlier, a dog who spots another dog at a distance
might take an attitude equally useful for concealment, attack, or defense.
Most times, we evaluate attitude objects for a purpose, because accurate evaluation is inherently adaptive. To quote William James (1890, p. 333), “My
thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.” It seems reasonable to assume, then, that aspects of the basic evaluation process might
be affected by attitude goals. As one example, different associations might be
activated depending on the goal of the moment.
When considering a political nominee who has worked for lobbying firms,
thoughts of politicians who have been involved in influence peddling might
be especially useful, come readily to mind, and suggest taking a negative
attitude. When considering a politician who might become the first woman
President, in contrast, activating thoughts of male politicians who have been
involved in sex scandals might be especially useful, come readily to mind,
and suggest taking a positive attitude. In both cases, the associations most
likely to be activated would be those most relevant to the specific evaluation
(Gonsalkorale, Sherman, Allen, Klauer, & Amodio, 2011).
Similarly, holding the associations that are activated constant, goals might
affect how those associations are perceived. Activating thoughts of a politician telling jokes on late night TV might carry different implications for inviting him to dinner than for supporting him as leader of the country. People are
often biased in how they perceive new information about an attitude object
(Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979), so it seems plausible that they might also be
biased by their goals in how they perceive old information that they brought
to mind in the service of accurate evaluation.

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

ATTITUDE ACCURACY
The adaptive importance of evaluation suggests also a need for further
research on attitude accuracy. If an attitude is conceived as something
people do, not something they have, then they can do it well, but they can
also do it poorly. They can pick up a poisonous snake whose bright colors
activated thoughts of Mardi Gras, or invest their life savings with a swindler
whose beard activated thoughts of Honest Abe. People are not always
accurate in their evaluations, and evaluation errors might reasonably be
traced to one or the other steps within the basic evaluation process.
Cognitive processes are “situated” in that they are influenced by the
situation in which they occur (Barsalou, 2005; Smith & Semin, 2004), and
the basic evaluation process is no exception. Some people might be better
than others in activating the right number of associations—not too few and
not too many—or at activating relevant rather than irrelevant associations.
One of the benefits of experience with an attitude object, in fact, might be
improvement at activating associations useful for the evaluative goal of the
moment. Fortunately, the basic evaluation process is malleable rather than
fixed (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995). People can learn to manage the process
so that they take more adaptive attitudes.
Attitude accuracy should be assessed not as answering attitude questions
in ways that predict future behavior, but instead as accuracy in taking adaptive attitudes—treating attitude objects in ways that are beneficial rather than
detrimental to the evaluator. People can be wrong when they report their own
attitudes. If they happen to activate unusual associations when completing
the psychologist’s attitude scales, then they can easily report “having” an
attitude that is deviant from the attitude that they usually take. It is currently
unclear what aspects of the basic evaluative process promote versus inhibit
accuracy, although we might speculate that factors such as ability to control cognitive associations and giving appropriate weight to subjective ease,
perceived source, and perceived relevance might prove important.

ATTITUDE NETWORKS
As described, the possible associations to an attitude object differ in their
probability of being activated during the basic evaluation process, but they
are also interdependent. A citizen who is deciding how to vote on a state referendum making it easier to recall office holders might activate associations
to both political sex scandals and political bribes. Activating instances of one
increases the likelihood that the other association of the same type will also
be activated, because cognitive associations operate on a network principle
(Smith & Queller, 2004).

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

11

When people activate cognitive associations, they tend to do so in clusters of interrelated ideas. Thus, network theory offers potential insights into
the basic evaluation process. The Internet, epidemics, power grids, scientific collaborations, and brain neurons all have network structures that differ in their density, transitivity, reciprocity, clustering, and other measurable
network properties (Newman, 2010). Similarly, individual nodes within networks differ in their centrality, closeness, similarity, and other measurable
properties (Newman, 2010). These network metrics could be used to examine more precisely the activation of associations that occur as part of the basic
evaluation process (Bressler & Menon, 2010). In addition, network analyses
could enhance understanding of changes in the associative network that correspond with changes in evaluating an attitude object (Boyasso, Loran, &
Vincent, 1993; Smith & DeCoster, 1998).
Finally, activation of associations from a cognitive network may be not
just probabilistic, but also somewhat chaotic—a desirable, adaptive feature.
Human hearts are more resistant to disease when heartbeats are slightly
chaotic rather than perfectly regular (Goldberger, 1996). Similarly, brain
waves during sleep and spontaneous firings of brain neurons are more
adaptive when they are slightly chaotic rather than perfectly rhythmic
(Golbin & Umantsev, 2006). Nature tends to favor unpredictable variation
over absolute predictability (Bak, 1996), so it is possible that this aspect of
the basic evaluation process—cross-temporal variation in the spontaneous
associations that come to mind for an attitude object—might provide
adaptive flexibility in the attitudes that people construct and take.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Because the high-probability associations to an attitude object are, by definition, likely to be activated across times and situations, and because their
evaluative implications usually change only slowly, the attitudes that people
take are likely to be reasonably stable. Because activation of specific associations to an attitude object is probabilistic and possibly chaotic, and sensitive
and flexible enough to reflect subtle changes in the social or nonsocial context, the attitudes that people take are also likely to vary in ways that are
usually adaptive. The way the system works is probably preferable to having organisms with relatively stable dispositions that somehow cause them
to do what they do. Even if conceptualizing attitudes as stable dispositions
did not constitute what Ross (1977) called the fundamental attribution error
(see also Ryle, 1949; Schwarz, 2006), conceptualizing attitudes as things people and animals do has already informed exciting research programs and will
inspire future research.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

REFERENCES
Allport, G. W. (1935). Attitudes. In C. Murchison (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology
(pp. 798–844). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
Bak, P. (1996). How nature works. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Situated conceptualization. In H. Cohen & C. Lefebvre (Eds.),
Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (pp. 619–650). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.
Bellezza, F. S. V. (1984). Reliability of retrieval from semantic memory: Common categories. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 22, 324–327.
Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation
and contrast effects: The inclusion/exclusion model. Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, 42, 319–373. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(10)42006-7
Boyasso, G. S., Loran, B., & Vincent, S. M. (1993). A graph theory model of the semantic structure of attitudes. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 411–425.
Bressler, S. L., & Menon, V. (2010). Large-scale brain networks in cognition: Emerging methods and principles. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 277–290. doi:10.1016/
j.tics.2010.04.004
Briñol, P., & Petty, R. E. (2003). Overt head movements and persuasion: A
self-validation analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1123–1139.
doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.6.1123
Crosby, F., Bromley, S., & Saxe, L. (1980). Recent unobtrusive studies of black and
white discrimination and prejudice: A literature review. Psychological Bulletin, 87,
546–563. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.87.3.546
Darwin, C. (1872/1955). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. New York,
NY: Philosophical Library.
Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments
and reactions: A word from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 267–285.
Fleming, D. (1967). Attitude: The history of a concept. Perspectives in American
History, 1, 287–365.
Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2007). Unraveling the processes underlying
evaluation: Attitudes from the perspective of the APE model. Social Cognition, 25,
687–717. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.687
Golbin, A., & Umantsev, A. (2006). Adaptive chaos: Mild disorder may help contain
major disease. Medical Hypotheses, 66, 182–187. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2005.06.031
Goldberger, A. L. (1996). Non-linear dynamics for clinicians: Chaos theory, fractals,
abd complexity at the bedside. Lancet, 347, 1312–1314. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736
(96)90948-4
Gonsalkorale, K., Sherman, J. W., Allen, T. J., Klauer, K. C., & Amodio, D. M. (2011).
Accounting for successful control of implicit racial bias: The roles of association
activation, response monitoring, and overcoming bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1534–1545. doi:10.1177/0146167211414064
Greenwald, A. G., Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003). Understanding and using the
implicit association test: I. An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.197

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

13

Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience.
In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133–168). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York, NY: Dover.
Janis, I. L., & King, B. T. (1954). The influence of role playing on opinion change.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 211–218. doi:10.1037/h0056957
Loersch, C., & Payne, B. K. (2012). On mental contamination: The role of
(mis)attribution in behavior priming. Social Cognition, 30, 241–252.
Lord, C. G., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Attitude representation theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 265–343. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60275-0
Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude
polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 2098–2109. doi:10.1037/00223514.37.11.2098
Maio, G. R., & Thomas, G. (2007). The epistemic-teleologic model of deliberate
self-persuasion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 46–67. doi:10.1177/
1088868306294589
Newman, M. E. J. (2010). Networks: An introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Payne, B. K., Burkley, M. A., & Stokes, M. B. (2008). Why do implicit and explicit
attitude tests diverge? The role of structural fit. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 94, 16–31. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.16
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion.
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 124–205.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the
attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173–220.
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London, England: Hutchison.
Schwarz, N. (1999). Self reports: How the questions shape the answers. American
Psychologist, 54, 93–105.
Schwarz, N. (2006). Attitude research: Between Ockham’s razor and the fundamental attribution error. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 19–21.
Schwarz, N. (2007). Attitude construction: Evaluation in context. Social Cognition, 25,
638–656. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.638
Schwarz, N., & Bohner, G. (2001). The construction of attitudes. In A. Tesser &
N. Schwarz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of basic principles: Intraindividual processes
(pp. 436–457). Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Sia, T. L., Lord, C. G., Blessum, K. A., Ratcliff, C. D., & Lepper, M. R. (1997). Is a rose
always a rose? The role of social category exemplar change in attitude stability
and attitude-behavior consistency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72,
501–514. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.3.501
Sia, T. L., Lord, C. G., Blessum, K. A., Thomas, J. C., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Activation of exemplars in the process of assessing social-category attitudes. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 517–532. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.76.4.517

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Smith, E. R., & DeCoster, J. (1998). Knowledge acquisition, accessibility, and use
in person perception and stereotyping: Simulation with a recurrent connectionist network. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 21–35. doi:10.1037/
0022-3514.74.1.21
Smith, E. R., & Queller, S. (2004). Mental representations. In M. B. Brewer & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Social cognition. Perspectives on social psychology (pp. 5–27). Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Smith, E. R., & Semin, G. R. (2004). Socially situated cognition: Cognition in its social
context. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 53–117.
Strack, F., & Hannover, B. (1996). Awareness of influence as a precondition for implementing correctional goals. In P. M. Gollwitzer & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology
of action: Linking cognition and motivation to behavior (pp. 579–596). New York, NY:
Guilford Press.
Tourangeau, R. (1992). Attitudes as memory structures: Belief sampling and context
effects. In N. Schwarz & S. Sudman (Eds.), Context effects in social and psychological
research (pp. 35–47). New York, NY: Springer Verlag.
Wallace, D. S., Paulson, R. M., Lord, C. G., & Bond, C. F., Jr. (2005). Which behaviors
do attitudes predict? Meta-analyzing the effects of social pressure and perceived
difficulty. Review of General Psychology, 9, 214–227. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.9.3.214
Wänke, M., Bohner, G., & Jurkowitz, A. (1997). There are many reasons to drive a
BMW: Does imagined ease of argument generation influence attitudes? Journal of
Consumer Research, 7, 299–322. doi:10.1086/209502
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101,
34–52. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34
Wilson, T. D., & Hodges, S. D. (1992). Attitudes as temporary constructions. In L. L.
Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.), The construction of social judgments (pp. 37–65). Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Wyer, R. S., & Srull, T. K. (1989). Memory and cognition in its social context.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

FURTHER READING
Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation and contrast effects: The inclusion/exclusion model. Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, 42, 319–373. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(10)42006-7
Lord, C. G., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Attitude representation theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 265–343. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60275-0
Maio, G. R., & Thomas, G. (2007). The epistemic-teleologic model of deliberate
self-persuasion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 46–67. doi:10.1177/
1088868306294589
Newman, M. E. J. (2010). Networks: An introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Schwarz, N. (2007). Attitude construction: Evaluation in context. Social Cognition, 25,
638–656. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.638
Smith, E. R., & Semin, G. R. (2004). Socially situated cognition: Cognition in its social
context. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 53–117.

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

15

CHARLES G. LORD SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Charles G. Lord earned a BA from the University of Rhode Island in 1976
and a PhD from Stanford University in 1980. His first academic position was
at Princeton University, where he served as an Assistant Professor from 1980
to 1987. From Princeton, he went to Texas Christian University in 1987, with
the rank of Associate Professor. He served as Chair of the Department of
Psychology at TCU from 1990 to 1994, and was promoted to Full Professor in
1992. During his career at TCU, he served as Associate Editor of the journal
Social Cognition for 12 years and served on the National Science Foundation
social psychology panel for 3 years. After another turn as department chair in
2001, he became Director of Graduate Studies for the psychology department
at TCU. During his career so far, he has mentored 23 successful PhD students,
and is currently mentoring 5 more. Over the past 33 years, his research has
continued to investigate attitude processes.
RELATED ESSAYS
Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Genetic Foundations of Attitude Formation (Political Science), Christian
Kandler et al.
Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E.
Tetlock


Attitude: Construction versus
Disposition
CHARLES G. LORD

Abstract
Although Charles Darwin conceptualized attitudes as things that organisms do,
many psychologists and laypeople today make the fundamental attribution error of
conceptualizing attitudes as dispositions people have that make them do what they
do. Recent attitudes research, however, has begun to explore the basic process by
which people construct attitudes—a process that operates in the same way when
answering general attitude questions as for any other evaluative response to an
attitude object. In the basic evaluation process, the evaluator activates associations to
the attitude object, perceives the implications of those associations, and bases evaluative responses at least in part on those implications. Instead of trying to measure
a relatively stable disposition that predicts future behavior, the emerging research
investigates influences on which associations get activated (e.g., chance, recency, and
priming) and influences on how the activated associations are perceived (including
subjective ease, the perceived source, and their perceived relevance). Interestingly,
the two steps in the basic evaluation process parallel the two strategies that people
use when they try to change their own attitudes. Emerging research directions that
were suggested by conceptualizing attitudes as things people do, not what they have,
include understanding the effects of evaluation goals on activating and perceiving
associations, assessing attitude accuracy according to how adaptive are the attitudes
that people take, and applying network theory to the basic evaluation process.

INTRODUCTION
Although the word “attitude” entered the English language in the early 1700s
(Fleming, 1967), the first major scholarly treatise in which the concept of attitude played a central role was Charles Darwin’s (1872/1955) Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin did not define the term, but he
used “attitude” consistently to describe things that people and animals do.
When a dog sees another dog at a distance, for instance, it “lowers its head,
generally crouches a little, or even lies down; that is, he takes the proper
attitude for concealing himself and for making a rush or spring” (Darwin,
1872/1955, p. 43). In those days, taking an attitude meant doing something
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

measurable that was positive or negative toward an attitude object. Organisms clearly constructed the attitudes that they took to cope with the contingencies of specific attitude objects in specific situations.
In the 1900s, psychologists started using the word “attitude” in a different way, to refer to a relatively stable disposition people have that makes
them do what they do. They viewed an attitude as “exerting a directive and
dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related” (Allport, 1935, p. 810). Viewed this way, attitudes could not have been constructed online, because the attitude came
first, and informed subsequent behavior. Even today, leading journals publish many articles in which attitudes are said to “guide,” “direct,” “drive,” or
“cause” people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Many contemporary psychology researchers and laypeople routinely commit the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977; Schwarz, 2006). They confuse something that people
do with something they have.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
This historical change in use of the word “attitude” affected the types
of research questions that psychologists asked. For almost a century,
researchers have tried to measure “attitude–behavior consistency.” The
investigators in approximately 1000 published studies asked participants
to report their attitudes toward an object and then let them treat that object
either favorably or unfavorably. This procedure seems reasonable when you
start from the assumption that people have a stable disposition that affects
their relevant actions. Finding better ways to measure that stable disposition
allows more confident prediction. It would be useful if people had within
them some directive force we could measure, that would allow us to know
in advance how they would vote, which products they would buy, and
whom they would fight. Despite these researchers’ best efforts, however,
answers to general attitude questions predicted only 16% of behavioral
variance (Wallace, Paulson, Lord, & Bond, 2005).
Many researchers reacted to this disappointing level of prediction by
asking additional and/or more specific attitude questions. These efforts
increased prediction, but predicted a smaller range of behaviors, with
increased costs of initial measurement. Other researchers distrusted participants’ answers to general attitude questions and used elaborate ruses
(Crosby, Bromley, & Saxe, 1980) or sophisticated computer techniques
(Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003) to measure attitudes. These indirect
or implicit measurement techniques often detect different dispositions
than the participants report when answering explicit attitude questions,
with implicit measures predicting better in some situations and explicit

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

3

measures predicting better in others (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2007;
Payne, Burkley, & Stokes, 2008).
Recently, however, some researchers have embraced the original conception of attitudes as describing something that people do rather than a stable
disposition they have that causes them to do what they do. With this different conception of “attitude” in mind, these researchers have begun asking
a different set of research questions. To understand this different research
agenda, consider the issue of predicting behavior from attitudes. If attitudes
are things that people do, then those 1000 studies of “attitude–behavior consistency” have been mislabeled. What actually happened in those studies was
that participants evaluated an attitude object twice, at two different times,
and usually in two different ways.
One evaluation typically consisted of reporting, on one or more scales, what
they thought their attitude was. The other evaluation typically consisted of
actions or intentions toward the same object. Participants might, for example,
report their attitudes toward politicians on attitude scales and later be asked
to donate money to a political action group. The researchers would call the
correlation between these two evaluations “attitude–behavior consistency.”
A more accurate operational term might be “evaluation–evaluation consistency.” The two evaluations are both measurable things that people do that
are favorable or unfavorable toward the attitude object. There is no need to
treat one of these evaluations as though it is different from the other, or to
claim that one of them measures an underlying disposition that affects the
other (Schwarz, 2006).
If we consider the two measures in studies of “attitude–behavior
consistency” to be two separate evaluations that use the same underlying
process, then we need to understand that process. We need to answer the
question: How do people evaluate? Recent research along these lines suggests that regardless of whether the specific evaluation includes answering
attitude questions or taking an action such as signing a petition, and people
use the same basic evaluation process.

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
BASIC EVALUATION PROCESS
In its simplest form, the basic evaluation process has two steps. First,
the to-be-evaluated object (e.g., “politicians”) activates a small number
of associations—not everything that is known about the object, but only
enough to go by (Sia, Lord, Blessum, Thomas, & Lepper, 1999; Wilson &
Hodges, 1992). The associations might be examples (members of congress),
characteristics (they are egotistical), actions (they give speeches), feelings

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

(they make me angry), one’s own actions (I protested the political convention), or anything else the person might connect with the attitude object
(Lord & Lepper, 1999). Associations are said to be activated or “come to
mind” when their heightened accessibility can be measured (e.g., by a lexical
decision task), even if the person is not consciously aware of the activation
(Higgins, 1996).
Second, the activated associations are perceived as implying favorable,
unfavorable, or neutral treatment of the attitude object, such as approach,
avoidance, help, or harm. Depending on situational factors, the perceived
implications might or might not result in a measurable response to the
attitude object. It is only through measurable responses that we can
detect “taking an attitude.” Nevertheless, researchers have developed
many methodologically sound ways to investigate both steps of the basic
evaluation process.
The basic evaluation process—activate associations and perceive their
implications—underlies all types of evaluations, whether completing an
attitude questionnaire or acting in any other measurable way that takes
an attitude toward an attitude object (Lord & Lepper, 1999; Schwarz &
Bohner, 2001; Tourangeau, 1992). An emerging understanding of this
process has sparked new research directions that start by assuming that
the attitudes people construct and take are flexible and adaptive. Completely random responding would not serve an organism well, but neither
would completely consistent responding. Fortunately, the basic evaluation
process has built into it two components that allow for adaptive attitude
flexibility. Attitude flexibility—evaluating the same object differently on
two separate occasions—is made possible both by changes in the associations that are activated and by changes in perceived implications of those
associations.

ACTIVATED ASSOCIATIONS
It has long been known that attitude change depends heavily, if not
exclusively, on the types of thoughts that people themselves generate
(Janis & King, 1954; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Self-generated thoughts take
precedence when people’s own thoughts conflict with what they are being
told (Briñol & Petty, 2003). Thus, the associations that come to mind have
considerable impact on how an attitude object is evaluated, and it is important to understand the factors that influence their activation. Relatively
recent research has shown that the subset of associations activated by an
attitude object on any given occasion can be affected by chance, by recency,
and by priming.

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

5

CHANCE
Spontaneous activation of associations is a probabilistic event. Even without changes in the attitude object itself, we would expect fluctuations from
one time to the next in which specific subset of possible associations gets
activated. When people are asked what vegetables, tools, or other natural
objects come to mind on two separate occasions, the probability that the same
associations will come to mind is less than 0.70 (Bellezza, 1984). When they
are asked what politicians, foreign leaders, or talk show hosts come to mind
on two separate occasions, the probability that the same ones will come to
mind is also less than 0.70 (Sia, Lord, Blessum, Ratcliff, & Lepper, 1997). For
many attitude objects, the activated associations differ spontaneously from
one occasion to the next. The same person will evaluate an attitude object
differently from one time to the next merely because associations of different
valence happen to come to mind (Lord & Lepper, 1999).
RECENCY
Beyond this baseline of spontaneous flexibility, though, people are sensitive
to subtle contextual cues that can alter which associations to an attitude object
get activated at any given time (Schwarz, 2007). One general principle is that
associations are more likely to get activated when they have come to mind
recently (Wyer & Srull, 1989). “Abraham Lincoln” and “Richard Nixon” may
each have a 0.05 chance of coming to mind when evaluating “politicians,” for
instance, but if only one of them comes to mind when evaluating politicians
today, then the likelihood of that same one coming to mind tomorrow is likely
to be increased beyond 0.05. If we visualize all possible associations to an
attitude object as forming a “push-down stack,” then an association activated
from the middle of the stack gets put back on the top of the stack, which
temporarily increases its probability of activation (Wyer & Srull, 1989). This
last-in-first-out principle might matter for evaluating “politicians,” because
most people would take a different attitude toward “politicians” if Lincoln
came to mind than if Nixon came to mind.
PRIMING
To show how flexible people can be in the attitudes that they take, consider
studies of priming effects (Loersch & Payne, 2012). In many studies, psychologists have experimentally increased the likelihood of activation for one versus another association by requiring that study participants think about one
of them immediately before evaluating the attitude object (Schwarz, 1999).
If you ask people how tall Abraham Lincoln was just before you ask them
to evaluate “politicians,” they will likely evaluate politicians more positively

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

than they would have had you not first got them thinking about Lincoln (Sia
et al., 1997).
These priming effects, in which researchers use subtle contextual cues to
increase the probability of activation for specific associations to an attitude
object, illustrate how finely people can tune their evaluations. Although it is
not always true that responses to an attitude object are more likely to be adaptive when you give greater importance to the last instance you encountered
than to an instance you have not encountered in a long time, more times than
not following the last-in-first out rule will be beneficial rather than harmful
(Schwarz, 2007).
PERCEIVED IMPLICATIONS OF THE ACTIVATED ASSOCIATIONS
If the basic evaluation process had only one step—activating associations to
the attitude object—then evaluations might follow invariably from the combined valence of the activated associations. Indeed, this is the usual outcome.
There are, however, exceptions to this general rule that highlight the importance of how the activated associations are perceived. The same associations
can be perceived as having either positive or negative implications for evaluating the attitude object depending on the subjective ease with which they
came to mind, their perceived source, and their perceived relevance to the
attitude object.
SUBJECTIVE EASE
The activation of associations to an attitude object carries with it more information than is contained in their valence. People who activate associations
get a feeling for how easily those associations came to mind, and this subjective ease or difficulty can have implications opposite to the valence of the
associations themselves. In a relevant study, German students named either 1
or 10 reasons for buying a BMW automobile (Wänke, Bohner, & Jurkowitsch,
1997). You might think that people who generated 10 positive associations to
an attitude object would take a more positive attitude toward it than people
generated only 1, but just the opposite was true. Students who had recently
generated 1 reason said they were more willing to buy a BMW than were
students who had recently generated 10 reasons.
These counterintuitive results occurred because the students found it relatively easy to generate 1 positive association—implying that BMWs must
have many positive attributes—whereas they found it relatively difficult to
generate 10 positive associations—implying that BMWs must have few positive attributes. The informational importance of subjective ease reinforces the

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

7

idea that people are sensitive and flexible in taking attitudes. Some dangerous activities have both positive and negative associations that might come to
mind, but avoiding them when the negative associations come more quickly
to mind than the positive ones is likely to prove adaptive in the long run.
PERCEIVED SOURCE
In perceiving implications of the activated associations, people are also sensitive to why they came to mind. The default assumption when we think of
something is that we made it happen. If we are evaluating “politicians,” for
instance, and “Romney” comes to mind, we tend to assume we thought of
Romney spontaneously. Studies of priming and context effects rely on this
assumption (Higgins, 1996). It would be unusual to suspect “I only thought
of Romney because I had recently answered a question about large corporations,” even when researchers can show empirically that this specific association had been experimentally primed.
Sometimes, though, the eternal influences become so obvious that we either
discount or react against the prime, perceiving implications exactly opposite
to the valence of the activated association. If we like Romney and conclude
that thoughts of Romney were forced on us, we might evaluate politicians
more negatively than otherwise—a contrast effect. When we are aware of
external influence on the associations that we generate, we tend to evaluate
the attitude object opposite to the valence of the activated associations (Bless
& Schwarz, 2010; Strack & Hannover, 1996).
PERCEIVED RELEVANCE
People also tend to assume that the activated associations are relevant to the
attitude object. When a disliked politician such as Nixon comes to mind, we
might consider him representative of “politicians,” which would imply an
unfavorable evaluation. This normal assumption suggests, however, that the
perceived implications of a particular association might be different if we
did not perceive it as representative of the attitude object—if, for instance,
we took Nixon to be so atypical and unrepresentative that he established a
standard to which other politicians should be compared.
People who evaluate an ambiguous politician are likely to treat that politician more favorably if they have recently been thinking about Adolph Hitler,
compared to whom the politician in question might look like a statesman,
than if they have recently been thinking about Franklin Roosevelt, compared
to whom the politician in question might look like a political hack (Bless &
Schwarz, 2010).

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

PARALLELS IN DELIBERATE SELF-PERSUASION
This description has highlighted two principles of the basic evaluation process that allow people to take flexible, adaptive attitudes. First, if people
usually activate only a subset of all their possible associations to the attitude
object, they might be able to control which specific associations get activated
at any given time to give preference to the ones most likely to be useful on
that occasion. Second, if people can perceive the same associations as having
different valence, they might be able to modify those perceptions so as to take
desired rather than undesired attitudes.
Interestingly, research on deliberate self-persuasion has shown that,
although people may not be consciously aware of when or why they are
doing it, they use the same two principles when they try deliberately to
change their own attitudes (Maio & Thomas, 2007). People who want to
take a more positive attitude toward their lives, their spouses, their jobs, or
themselves do it by controlling which associations get activated and/or by
altering implications of the activated associations. People who want to take
a less positive attitude toward self-detrimental behaviors such as smoking,
binge drinking, or overeating also do it by controlling which associations
get activated and/or by altering the perceived evaluative implications of the
associations that get activated.
Many people have successfully changed the attitudes that they take toward
important attitude objects by using one or both of these two strategies that
attack the two components of the basic evaluation process. To change which
associations get activated, people concentrate on the associations they want
to be activated, preempt unwanted associations, suppress unwanted associations, and/or distract themselves by thinking about something else (Maio
& Thomas, 2007). These tactics are not always successful (Wegner, 1994), but
they all involve efforts to intervene in the activation part of the process, without necessarily working on their evaluative implications.
To change perceived implications of the associations that get activated,
people interpret activated associations to be more in line with their desired
attitude, convince themselves that undesired associations also have desired
attributes, try to explain away undesired associations, question their validity,
adopt new standards of comparison, and/or convince themselves that the
undesired associations are relatively unimportant (Maio & Thomas, 2007).
Again, these tactics are not always successful, but they all involve efforts
to intervene in the part of the process that involves perceiving different
implications of the activated associations, without necessarily working on
the activation process itself.
The striking parallels between how the basic evaluation process works and
how people deliberately change their own attitudes suggest that research on

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

9

the basic evaluation process has identified two important components of how
people successfully navigate a complex animate and inanimate environment.
By working on the two components of the basic evaluation process, people
can take positive attitudes toward objects beneficial to them, and can also
take negative attitudes toward objects detrimental to them.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Conceiving of attitudes as things that people do also offers the prospect of
exciting new research avenues that might not have been pursued otherwise.
One direction, just described, involves investigating parallels between the
basic evaluation process and deliberate self-persuasion. Other possible directions for future research include goals, accuracy, and networks.
ATTITUDE GOALS
The way Darwin used the term “attitude” involved a readiness for action. In
Darwin’s example quoted earlier, a dog who spots another dog at a distance
might take an attitude equally useful for concealment, attack, or defense.
Most times, we evaluate attitude objects for a purpose, because accurate evaluation is inherently adaptive. To quote William James (1890, p. 333), “My
thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.” It seems reasonable to assume, then, that aspects of the basic evaluation process might
be affected by attitude goals. As one example, different associations might be
activated depending on the goal of the moment.
When considering a political nominee who has worked for lobbying firms,
thoughts of politicians who have been involved in influence peddling might
be especially useful, come readily to mind, and suggest taking a negative
attitude. When considering a politician who might become the first woman
President, in contrast, activating thoughts of male politicians who have been
involved in sex scandals might be especially useful, come readily to mind,
and suggest taking a positive attitude. In both cases, the associations most
likely to be activated would be those most relevant to the specific evaluation
(Gonsalkorale, Sherman, Allen, Klauer, & Amodio, 2011).
Similarly, holding the associations that are activated constant, goals might
affect how those associations are perceived. Activating thoughts of a politician telling jokes on late night TV might carry different implications for inviting him to dinner than for supporting him as leader of the country. People are
often biased in how they perceive new information about an attitude object
(Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979), so it seems plausible that they might also be
biased by their goals in how they perceive old information that they brought
to mind in the service of accurate evaluation.

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

ATTITUDE ACCURACY
The adaptive importance of evaluation suggests also a need for further
research on attitude accuracy. If an attitude is conceived as something
people do, not something they have, then they can do it well, but they can
also do it poorly. They can pick up a poisonous snake whose bright colors
activated thoughts of Mardi Gras, or invest their life savings with a swindler
whose beard activated thoughts of Honest Abe. People are not always
accurate in their evaluations, and evaluation errors might reasonably be
traced to one or the other steps within the basic evaluation process.
Cognitive processes are “situated” in that they are influenced by the
situation in which they occur (Barsalou, 2005; Smith & Semin, 2004), and
the basic evaluation process is no exception. Some people might be better
than others in activating the right number of associations—not too few and
not too many—or at activating relevant rather than irrelevant associations.
One of the benefits of experience with an attitude object, in fact, might be
improvement at activating associations useful for the evaluative goal of the
moment. Fortunately, the basic evaluation process is malleable rather than
fixed (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995). People can learn to manage the process
so that they take more adaptive attitudes.
Attitude accuracy should be assessed not as answering attitude questions
in ways that predict future behavior, but instead as accuracy in taking adaptive attitudes—treating attitude objects in ways that are beneficial rather than
detrimental to the evaluator. People can be wrong when they report their own
attitudes. If they happen to activate unusual associations when completing
the psychologist’s attitude scales, then they can easily report “having” an
attitude that is deviant from the attitude that they usually take. It is currently
unclear what aspects of the basic evaluative process promote versus inhibit
accuracy, although we might speculate that factors such as ability to control cognitive associations and giving appropriate weight to subjective ease,
perceived source, and perceived relevance might prove important.

ATTITUDE NETWORKS
As described, the possible associations to an attitude object differ in their
probability of being activated during the basic evaluation process, but they
are also interdependent. A citizen who is deciding how to vote on a state referendum making it easier to recall office holders might activate associations
to both political sex scandals and political bribes. Activating instances of one
increases the likelihood that the other association of the same type will also
be activated, because cognitive associations operate on a network principle
(Smith & Queller, 2004).

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

11

When people activate cognitive associations, they tend to do so in clusters of interrelated ideas. Thus, network theory offers potential insights into
the basic evaluation process. The Internet, epidemics, power grids, scientific collaborations, and brain neurons all have network structures that differ in their density, transitivity, reciprocity, clustering, and other measurable
network properties (Newman, 2010). Similarly, individual nodes within networks differ in their centrality, closeness, similarity, and other measurable
properties (Newman, 2010). These network metrics could be used to examine more precisely the activation of associations that occur as part of the basic
evaluation process (Bressler & Menon, 2010). In addition, network analyses
could enhance understanding of changes in the associative network that correspond with changes in evaluating an attitude object (Boyasso, Loran, &
Vincent, 1993; Smith & DeCoster, 1998).
Finally, activation of associations from a cognitive network may be not
just probabilistic, but also somewhat chaotic—a desirable, adaptive feature.
Human hearts are more resistant to disease when heartbeats are slightly
chaotic rather than perfectly regular (Goldberger, 1996). Similarly, brain
waves during sleep and spontaneous firings of brain neurons are more
adaptive when they are slightly chaotic rather than perfectly rhythmic
(Golbin & Umantsev, 2006). Nature tends to favor unpredictable variation
over absolute predictability (Bak, 1996), so it is possible that this aspect of
the basic evaluation process—cross-temporal variation in the spontaneous
associations that come to mind for an attitude object—might provide
adaptive flexibility in the attitudes that people construct and take.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Because the high-probability associations to an attitude object are, by definition, likely to be activated across times and situations, and because their
evaluative implications usually change only slowly, the attitudes that people
take are likely to be reasonably stable. Because activation of specific associations to an attitude object is probabilistic and possibly chaotic, and sensitive
and flexible enough to reflect subtle changes in the social or nonsocial context, the attitudes that people take are also likely to vary in ways that are
usually adaptive. The way the system works is probably preferable to having organisms with relatively stable dispositions that somehow cause them
to do what they do. Even if conceptualizing attitudes as stable dispositions
did not constitute what Ross (1977) called the fundamental attribution error
(see also Ryle, 1949; Schwarz, 2006), conceptualizing attitudes as things people and animals do has already informed exciting research programs and will
inspire future research.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

REFERENCES
Allport, G. W. (1935). Attitudes. In C. Murchison (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology
(pp. 798–844). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
Bak, P. (1996). How nature works. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Situated conceptualization. In H. Cohen & C. Lefebvre (Eds.),
Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (pp. 619–650). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.
Bellezza, F. S. V. (1984). Reliability of retrieval from semantic memory: Common categories. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 22, 324–327.
Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation
and contrast effects: The inclusion/exclusion model. Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, 42, 319–373. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(10)42006-7
Boyasso, G. S., Loran, B., & Vincent, S. M. (1993). A graph theory model of the semantic structure of attitudes. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 411–425.
Bressler, S. L., & Menon, V. (2010). Large-scale brain networks in cognition: Emerging methods and principles. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 277–290. doi:10.1016/
j.tics.2010.04.004
Briñol, P., & Petty, R. E. (2003). Overt head movements and persuasion: A
self-validation analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1123–1139.
doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.6.1123
Crosby, F., Bromley, S., & Saxe, L. (1980). Recent unobtrusive studies of black and
white discrimination and prejudice: A literature review. Psychological Bulletin, 87,
546–563. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.87.3.546
Darwin, C. (1872/1955). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. New York,
NY: Philosophical Library.
Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments
and reactions: A word from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 267–285.
Fleming, D. (1967). Attitude: The history of a concept. Perspectives in American
History, 1, 287–365.
Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2007). Unraveling the processes underlying
evaluation: Attitudes from the perspective of the APE model. Social Cognition, 25,
687–717. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.687
Golbin, A., & Umantsev, A. (2006). Adaptive chaos: Mild disorder may help contain
major disease. Medical Hypotheses, 66, 182–187. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2005.06.031
Goldberger, A. L. (1996). Non-linear dynamics for clinicians: Chaos theory, fractals,
abd complexity at the bedside. Lancet, 347, 1312–1314. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736
(96)90948-4
Gonsalkorale, K., Sherman, J. W., Allen, T. J., Klauer, K. C., & Amodio, D. M. (2011).
Accounting for successful control of implicit racial bias: The roles of association
activation, response monitoring, and overcoming bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1534–1545. doi:10.1177/0146167211414064
Greenwald, A. G., Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003). Understanding and using the
implicit association test: I. An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.197

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

13

Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience.
In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133–168). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York, NY: Dover.
Janis, I. L., & King, B. T. (1954). The influence of role playing on opinion change.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 211–218. doi:10.1037/h0056957
Loersch, C., & Payne, B. K. (2012). On mental contamination: The role of
(mis)attribution in behavior priming. Social Cognition, 30, 241–252.
Lord, C. G., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Attitude representation theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 265–343. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60275-0
Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude
polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 2098–2109. doi:10.1037/00223514.37.11.2098
Maio, G. R., & Thomas, G. (2007). The epistemic-teleologic model of deliberate
self-persuasion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 46–67. doi:10.1177/
1088868306294589
Newman, M. E. J. (2010). Networks: An introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Payne, B. K., Burkley, M. A., & Stokes, M. B. (2008). Why do implicit and explicit
attitude tests diverge? The role of structural fit. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 94, 16–31. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.16
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion.
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 124–205.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the
attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173–220.
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London, England: Hutchison.
Schwarz, N. (1999). Self reports: How the questions shape the answers. American
Psychologist, 54, 93–105.
Schwarz, N. (2006). Attitude research: Between Ockham’s razor and the fundamental attribution error. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 19–21.
Schwarz, N. (2007). Attitude construction: Evaluation in context. Social Cognition, 25,
638–656. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.638
Schwarz, N., & Bohner, G. (2001). The construction of attitudes. In A. Tesser &
N. Schwarz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of basic principles: Intraindividual processes
(pp. 436–457). Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Sia, T. L., Lord, C. G., Blessum, K. A., Ratcliff, C. D., & Lepper, M. R. (1997). Is a rose
always a rose? The role of social category exemplar change in attitude stability
and attitude-behavior consistency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72,
501–514. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.3.501
Sia, T. L., Lord, C. G., Blessum, K. A., Thomas, J. C., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Activation of exemplars in the process of assessing social-category attitudes. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 517–532. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.76.4.517

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Smith, E. R., & DeCoster, J. (1998). Knowledge acquisition, accessibility, and use
in person perception and stereotyping: Simulation with a recurrent connectionist network. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 21–35. doi:10.1037/
0022-3514.74.1.21
Smith, E. R., & Queller, S. (2004). Mental representations. In M. B. Brewer & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Social cognition. Perspectives on social psychology (pp. 5–27). Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Smith, E. R., & Semin, G. R. (2004). Socially situated cognition: Cognition in its social
context. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 53–117.
Strack, F., & Hannover, B. (1996). Awareness of influence as a precondition for implementing correctional goals. In P. M. Gollwitzer & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology
of action: Linking cognition and motivation to behavior (pp. 579–596). New York, NY:
Guilford Press.
Tourangeau, R. (1992). Attitudes as memory structures: Belief sampling and context
effects. In N. Schwarz & S. Sudman (Eds.), Context effects in social and psychological
research (pp. 35–47). New York, NY: Springer Verlag.
Wallace, D. S., Paulson, R. M., Lord, C. G., & Bond, C. F., Jr. (2005). Which behaviors
do attitudes predict? Meta-analyzing the effects of social pressure and perceived
difficulty. Review of General Psychology, 9, 214–227. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.9.3.214
Wänke, M., Bohner, G., & Jurkowitz, A. (1997). There are many reasons to drive a
BMW: Does imagined ease of argument generation influence attitudes? Journal of
Consumer Research, 7, 299–322. doi:10.1086/209502
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101,
34–52. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34
Wilson, T. D., & Hodges, S. D. (1992). Attitudes as temporary constructions. In L. L.
Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.), The construction of social judgments (pp. 37–65). Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Wyer, R. S., & Srull, T. K. (1989). Memory and cognition in its social context.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

FURTHER READING
Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation and contrast effects: The inclusion/exclusion model. Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, 42, 319–373. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(10)42006-7
Lord, C. G., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Attitude representation theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 265–343. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60275-0
Maio, G. R., & Thomas, G. (2007). The epistemic-teleologic model of deliberate
self-persuasion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 46–67. doi:10.1177/
1088868306294589
Newman, M. E. J. (2010). Networks: An introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Schwarz, N. (2007). Attitude construction: Evaluation in context. Social Cognition, 25,
638–656. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.638
Smith, E. R., & Semin, G. R. (2004). Socially situated cognition: Cognition in its social
context. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 53–117.

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition

15

CHARLES G. LORD SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Charles G. Lord earned a BA from the University of Rhode Island in 1976
and a PhD from Stanford University in 1980. His first academic position was
at Princeton University, where he served as an Assistant Professor from 1980
to 1987. From Princeton, he went to Texas Christian University in 1987, with
the rank of Associate Professor. He served as Chair of the Department of
Psychology at TCU from 1990 to 1994, and was promoted to Full Professor in
1992. During his career at TCU, he served as Associate Editor of the journal
Social Cognition for 12 years and served on the National Science Foundation
social psychology panel for 3 years. After another turn as department chair in
2001, he became Director of Graduate Studies for the psychology department
at TCU. During his career so far, he has mentored 23 successful PhD students,
and is currently mentoring 5 more. Over the past 33 years, his research has
continued to investigate attitude processes.
RELATED ESSAYS
Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Genetic Foundations of Attitude Formation (Political Science), Christian
Kandler et al.
Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E.
Tetlock



Media

Attitude: Construction versus Disposition