Richard E Petty - Böcker

This book provides a needed survey of a truly remarkable number of different theoretical approaches to the related phenomena of attitude and belief change. It focuses on variable perspective theory which is far more deserving of attention than the present level of research activity.

Social psychologists have long recognized the possibility that attitudes might differ from one another in terms of their strength, but only recently had the profound implications of this view been explored. Yet because investigators in the area were pursuing interesting but independent programs of research exploring different aspects of strength, there was little articulation of assumptions underlying the work, and little effort to establish a common research agenda. The goals of this book are to highlight these assumptions, to review the discoveries this work has produced, and to suggest directions for future work in the area.The chapter authors include individuals who have made significant contributions to the published literature and represent a diversity of perspectives on the topic. In addition to providing an overview of the broad area of attitude strength, particular chapters deal in depth with specific features of attitudes related to strength and integrate the diverse bodies of relevant theory and empirical evidence. The book will be of interest to graduate students initiating work on attitudes as well as to longstanding scholars in the field. Because of the many potential directions for application of work on attitude strength to amelioration of social problems, the book will be valuable to scholars in various applied disciplines such as political science, marketing, sociology, public opinion, and others studying attitudinal phenomena.

Social psychologists have long recognized the possibility that attitudes might differ from one another in terms of their strength, but only recently had the profound implications of this view been explored. Yet because investigators in the area were pursuing interesting but independent programs of research exploring different aspects of strength, there was little articulation of assumptions underlying the work, and little effort to establish a common research agenda. The goals of this book are to highlight these assumptions, to review the discoveries this work has produced, and to suggest directions for future work in the area.The chapter authors include individuals who have made significant contributions to the published literature and represent a diversity of perspectives on the topic. In addition to providing an overview of the broad area of attitude strength, particular chapters deal in depth with specific features of attitudes related to strength and integrate the diverse bodies of relevant theory and empirical evidence. The book will be of interest to graduate students initiating work on attitudes as well as to longstanding scholars in the field. Because of the many potential directions for application of work on attitude strength to amelioration of social problems, the book will be valuable to scholars in various applied disciplines such as political science, marketing, sociology, public opinion, and others studying attitudinal phenomena.

This book tackles a subject that has captured the imagination of many researchers in the field: attitudes. Although the field has always recognized that people’s attitudes could be assessed in different ways, from direct self-reports to disguised observations of behavior, the past decade has shown several new approaches to attitude measurement. Despite the fact that there is no monolithic point of view with respect to implicit attitudes or measures, this book proves informative in capturing the exciting developments that have taken place over the past decade in the study of attitudes, and point the way for future exploration. Although researchers in the field have long used physiological measures, more sophisticated approaches have now been developed that rely on brain imaging techniques to examine evaluative processes. This book addresses all of these new techniques, as well as the new wave of implicit measures and the contribution they have made to understanding attitudes and attitude change.This volume will be an essential resource for students and researchers in social psychology with an interest in the core topic of attitudes.

This book provides a needed survey of a truly remarkable number of different theoretical approaches to the related phenomena of attitude and belief change. It focuses on variable perspective theory which is far more deserving of attention than the present level of research activity.

The Handbook of Personalized Persuasion provides the most comprehensive and state-of-the-art review of the expansive literature on personalized messaging in persuasion.The book describes what features of people, messages, and contexts are most effective for personally tailored communication, and how this knowledge can be leveraged to improve the influence of messaging in any domain. It also addresses when such personalization can be counterproductive or backfire. Bringing together some of the foremost experts in the area, the book consists of a diverse, global, and interdisciplinary set of scholars who tackle the theory and application of personalized persuasion. Organized into two sections, the first part of this book addresses the many aspects of people to which messages can be targeted, such as the basis of a person’s attitude or the person’s goals or identity. The second part of this book tackles the many important areas of application in which personalized messaging has been examined, such as political and health messaging, consumer advertising, and even online misinformation.This handbook is essential reading for researchers and students in social psychology and across the behavioral and social sciences, while also offering practitioners in marketing, government, and beyond the most cutting-edge insights into how to maximize the influence of personalized persuasion.

This book tackles a subject that has captured the imagination of many researchers in the field: attitudes. Although the field has always recognized that people’s attitudes could be assessed in different ways, from direct self-reports to disguised observations of behavior, the past decade has shown several new approaches to attitude measurement. Despite the fact that there is no monolithic point of view with respect to implicit attitudes or measures, this book proves informative in capturing the exciting developments that have taken place over the past decade in the study of attitudes, and point the way for future exploration. Although researchers in the field have long used physiological measures, more sophisticated approaches have now been developed that rely on brain imaging techniques to examine evaluative processes. This book addresses all of these new techniques, as well as the new wave of implicit measures and the contribution they have made to understanding attitudes and attitude change.This volume will be an essential resource for students and researchers in social psychology with an interest in the core topic of attitudes.

It has been over 10 years since we initiated work on our first series of collaborative experiments. As graduate students, we had great fun planning, conducting, and writing this research (Petty & Cacioppo, 1977). We enjoyed arguing with each other at our initial meeting in 1973 and have sub­ sequently become best friends, but neither of us suspected at the time that we would or could actively maintain a research collaboration over the next decade, or that we would now find ourselves in a position to write this monograph. As we note in Chapter 1, we began our studies of persuasion at a time when social psychology was in "crisis," and interest in research on attitude change in particular was declining. As we write this, we are aware of six new volumes on persuasion that are in press or in preparation and that should appear over the next few years. In retrospect, it is not so surprising that research on attitudes and persuasion would reemerge as a central concern of social psychology. We believe that human feelings, beliefs, and behaviors, whether in the domain of interpersonal relations (e. g. , marriage, aggression), politics (e. g. , voting, revolution), health (e. g. , following a medical regimen), or economics (e. g. , consumer purchases) are greatly influenced by the evaluations people have of other people, objects, and issues. Furthermore, evaluations (attitudes) are influenced by affect, cognition, and behavior.

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.