14Chapter 1We invited our experts to write about their lines of inquiry in the spirit of excit-ing promotion of ideas and interesting, timely illustrations of these ideas. Ratherthan furnish comprehensive documentation of pertinent studies or theoreticalintricacies, we invited our authors to provide a view of the big picture that will beengaging and accessible to the nonpsychologist. Should you wish to “read moreabout it,” each chapter also provides an extensive bibliography of the authors’ pri-mary sources for research and theory in the area.Scientific terms are used sparingly in this volume, and readers will probably befamiliar with most of them. However, you may occasionally find it instructive torefer to the Glossary in the back of this book. It furnishes clear and complete defi-nitions of words and phrases that are part of the language of persuasion research.Persuasion processes are fundamental to democratic and free-market societies.Persuasion processes are the mechanism through which individuals make criticaldecisions about their government, their marketplace, their community, and theirlifestyle. By providing this glimpse into the psychology of persuasion, our goal isto sharpen your understanding of its workings and strengthen your appreciationof its role in our society.2ATTITUDE SCALESHow We Measure the UnmeasurableTHOMAS M. OSTROMCHARLES F. BOND, JR.The Ohio State UniversityTexas Christian UniversityJON A. KROSNICKCONSTANTINE SEDIKIDESThe Ohio State UniversityUniversity of North CarolinaWeldon and Babbs were in a pickle. The test results were clear cut. Babbs waspregnant. It was early in their relationship; they were still trying to find out justhow well they liked each other. They had not yet discussed the possibility of mar-riage, much less the idea of having children. What to do?One of the options they discussed was abortion. Babbs favored it, but Weldonhad serious misgivings. Both of them came into the relationship with fairly well-developed attitudes about abortion. Babbs’s good friend Cindy had previously hadan abortion. The two of them had talked it over at some length before Cindy decidedto go ahead with it. Fortunately, all had gone well. Cindy had become a vocal advo-cate of abortion rights. Babbs was sympathetic with her friend’s views and once hadeven helped Cindy prepare materials for a pro-choice fund-raising drive.Weldon’s experiences had been quite different. His sister had an abortion twoyears ago, despite strong opposition from her parents. As a consequence of theirangry reactions, she had moved to her own apartment and eventually stoppedattending church with the family. Even though she still lived in the same city, shedid not talk with Weldon or her parents more than once or twice a year. Weldonblamed the abortion for the breakup of his family.16Chapter 2Life experiences can lead people to acquire very different thoughts and feel-ings about the world around them. Babbs and Weldon have developed oppositeattitudes about abortion, differences that lead them to take very different. . .approaches to their present dilemma.And they are now in the midst of a new liteexperience that may well lead them to reshape the attitudes they brought into theirrelationship, either through becoming harder and more extreme or through revi-sion and accommodation.You, the reader, now have a sense of the differences in views toward abortionheld by Babbs and Weldon. Their attitudes differ in fundamental ways and yet arenot completely incompatible or irreconcilable. With those subtle hues and shadingsin mind, consider the problem of the scientist whose objective is to study the natureof human attitudes. As scientists, we must move from the more impressionistic,evocative, and cinematic portrayal of Babbs’s and Weldon’s attitudes to a more rig-orous and precise description. We must devise concrete ways to measure how atti-tudes differ from person to person.In short, we want to assign numbers toattitudes.How Can We Know Another Person’s Attitudes?How did Babbs and Weldon manage to learn about each other’s attitudes towardabortion? No doubt, most of their information came as a natural result of beingtogether and talking about the things that matter to them. When the pregnancyoccurred, the discussions became soul searching and intense.There are at least four sources of information we draw upon to know anotherperson’s attitude. At first blush, the most straightforward is simply to ask the per-son. But as this chapter will show, direct questions do not always lead to direct (orcorrect) answers. A second source of information comes through observing howthe person reacts to the attitude topic when it is raised in conversation or in otherways. For example, how does Weldon react to television news about a fire bomb-ing of an abortion clinic? Is he indifferent, does he shake his head in disgust, ordoes he have a secret smile of satisfaction? Nonverbal reactions can convey vol-umes of information. Third, we can learn what kinds of actions the person will takewhen presented with the opportunity to help or harm the attitude object. Forexample, Babbs’s helping Cindy with the pro-choice fund-raising drive clearly con-veys a positive attitude. Fourth, people tend to associate with others who sharetheir attitudes. So we can look at the attitudes held by the friends and family of aperson to get an idea of his or her attitude.Babbs and Weldon had spent a lot of time with one another, and so they coulddraw upon all four of these kinds of information to come to know how the otherfelt about abortion. To the extent that all four sources of information about a per-son’s attitude tell the same story, then we can have some confidence that we haveunderstood the attitude. But gathering all this information takes time.Attitude researchers do not have the luxury of spending months, weeks, oreven hours with a person. We have had to devise ways of measuring attitudes thatAffifude Scales17can be administered in a very short time period. National surveys on political atti-tudes or consumer attitudes rarely devote more than a minute or two to measuringattitudes toward a particular political candidate or toward a new brand of toiletpaper. Often such surveys will use just a single question to measure the attitude.Why Measure Attitudes?This book focuses on the persuasion process. It addresses the question of whatleads people to change their attitudes. Persuasion occurs at the interpersonal