The Structure of Individual Attitudes and Attitude Systems

Attitude structure is a timely topic because social psychology is moving into a 1980s and 1990s systems era in which it will be a central concern (McGuire, 1986a). This systems preoccupation will be the third time that attitudes has become social psychology’s central focus since the discipline emerged as a respected field of psychology in the 1920s. The first flourish­ ing of social psychology in the 1920s and 1930s was focused on attitude measurement with psychologists like Bogardus, Thurstone, and Likert be­ queathing a legacy of still-popular scaling procedures. Interest in attitudes declined during the 1935 to 1955 group dynamics era of social psychology but reemerged in the 1950s and 1960s attitude-change flourishing. Now, after the recent 1965 to 1985 social cognition era, we are witnessing the emergence of a third attitude flourishing, likely to dominate in the 1980s and 1990s, focused on attitude systems-their content, structure, and functioning.