Despite the central place that the study of attitudes has long held in social psycho logical research, the last decade or so has been relatively quiet as far as the de velopment of attitude theory has been concerned. If one looks back to the Yale studies on communication and persuasion in the 1950s, followed by the massive literature derived from cognitive dissonance theory and its alternatives, there may be a temptation to think that the well of researchable questions has run almost dry. The purpose of this book is to convince the reader that this is not the case. On the contrary, a new look...