The study of likes and dislikes - what social psychologists refer to as "attitudes" - has been a central focus of the field for decades. What are attitudes? How can we study and measure them scientifically? How are they formed and changed? Of what functional value, if any, are they? How do they come to influence our attention, perception, judgments, and behavior? These are among the questions that have spurred social psychological research on attitudes, and they are among the issues addressed in this volume.
The articles reprinted in this collection represent noteworthy developments in the field's understanding of attitudes. Together, the readings provide a representative and broad coverage of the literature, illustrating well what the field has come to learn about the structure, function, and consequences of attitudes.