J. Richard Eiser - Böcker

The Expression of Attitude deals with a number of broad but interrelated questions: what are attitudes, how do they relate to behavior, how are they acquired, and in what ways can they be shared? The author argues that consistency, within attitude structure and between attitudes and behavior, arises primarily from interpersonal rather than intrapersonal processes. Emphasis is placed on how people interpret behavior as an expression of attitude, and what they demand of such behavior before they treat it as decodable in a particular way.

"Double Take" is a drug education package produced by the Department of Health and Social Security (United Kingdom). This video package was distributed at no cost to all secondary schools catering to students from eleven years onwards in England and Wales during 1986. This book reports the results of a research evaluation of this educational package, particularly in terms of its acceptability to teachers and pupils. The evaluation discussed in this book was conducted deliberately within the context of organizational and methodological restrictions. The primary concern was less with the potential effectiveness of "Double Take" under optimal conditions. Rather, the investigators were interested in the ways in which teachers themselves chose to adopt and integrate the package within existing courses and with the restrictions of pupils in their schools.

Elicitation is the process of extracting expert knowledge about some unknown quantity or quantities, and formulating that information as a probability distribution. Elicitation is important in situations, such as modelling the safety of nuclear installations or assessing the risk of terrorist attacks, where expert knowledge is essentially the only source of good information. It also plays a major role in other contexts by augmenting scarce observational data, through the use of Bayesian statistical methods. However, elicitation is not a simple task, and practitioners need to be aware of a wide range of research findings in order to elicit expert judgements accurately and reliably. Uncertain Judgements introduces the area, before guiding the reader through the study of appropriate elicitation methods, illustrated by a variety of multi-disciplinary examples. This is achieved by: Presenting a methodological framework for the elicitation of expert knowledge incorporating findings from both statistical and psychological research.Detailing techniques for the elicitation of a wide range of standard distributions, appropriate to the most common types of quantities.Providing a comprehensive review of the available literature and pointing to the best practice methods and future research needs.Using examples from many disciplines, including statistics, psychology, engineering and health sciences.Including an extensive glossary of statistical and psychological terms.An ideal source and guide for statisticians and psychologists with interests in expert judgement or practical applications of Bayesian analysis, Uncertain Judgements will also benefit decision-makers, risk analysts, engineers and researchers in the medical and social sciences.

Written principally for students at the intermediate level, this text provides a broad critical review of the various empirical and theoretical traditions from which contemporary social psychology derives and, as the subtitle implies, offers balanced (though necessarily selective) insights into the perspectives that different researchers have adopted. It derives from J. Richard Eiser's previous textbook, Cognitive social psychology, which has been thoroughly revised and reorganized, incorporating fresh material that reflects the changes that have been taking place in the field since the beginning of the decade. The approach is broadly cognitive, though by no means narrowly so, the three main parts - 'Attitudes', 'Judgement and Interference' and 'Identity and Interaction' - indicating the principal emphases. Although it is North American research that has made the greatest contribution to our understanding of social behaviour, significant European work is not neglected in Richard Eiser's exposition. It is this awareness of the dynamism of the field and of the cross-fertilization taking place between different disciplines that gives this text its distinctive flavour and attraction for students and professionals alike.

This book presents a broad-ranging and fascinating examination of attitudes: how we form them; how we organize them towards others; and whether they are inherently human or could also be developed by computers. Professor Eiser suggests there are fundamental objections to the idea of a computer having a sense of self or a set of attitutdes.

The concept of attitude has long been a central part of social psychological theories. It is important in other disciplines too, such as economics, business studies, politics and sociology. Originally published in 1988, the authors of this text show how attitudes and motives are crucial in human decision-making, and explore the relationship between them. They look closely at the real context of people’s attitudes and behaviour, pointing out that attitudes are both a social product and an intrinsic part of social action. The authors show that theories of judgment, attitudes, attribution and decision-making can make important contributions to social issues such as the employment of nuclear energy, the storage of nuclear waste, health behaviour and medical decision-making. They emphasize that social psychology is relevant to a wide variety of social issues, deriving from the theoretical and distinctive methods that social psychology has developed.