Introduction What is an attitude? In a complex world a quick evaluation of objects and situations is very helpful. It can guide our attention and behavior toward the things that matter to us. Attitudes are such evaluations. They can refer to anything one can conceive of: individuals and groups, products, music, or even smells, as well as suggestions and ideas. For example, when we meet someone new, we form an attitude toward our new acquaintance within seconds. Often, we do not know where this

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... ffective reaction comes from. Attitudes can be formed in various ways: Imagine you are browsing the Internet for a holiday destination. You will find hundreds of different offers for package tours: how do you decide which one to book? You may like the pictures of the sea or of people relaxing in a bar. Maybe the web advertisement claims that 89% of costumers were highly satisfied with the holiday. Or, if it is very important to you not to spend too much money, you will elaborate carefully on which services are included. Eventually, you will come up with a summary evaluation regarding which offer is the best, and, if you consider the price to be appropriate, perhaps buy it. As this example illustrates, many different aspects can impact the evaluation of an object. A spontaneous affective reaction is immediately activated (in this case that could be a positive reaction to sunny pictures), heuristic inferences are made, for instance, "if 89% were happy it must be quite good", or very systematic thinking about the concrete features of the offer results in a judgment of whether this holiday suits you or not (see Erb, et al., 1998, expt. 2). How to measure attitudes? Social psychologists invented a large range of measurement paradigms that tap into different aspects of attitudes and attitude change. The simplest way to assess an attitude is to just ask people how they like something, on a scale, for instance, from "not at all" (1) to (7) "definitely like it," or to ask whether or not they agree with statements in favor or disfavor of the attitude object (Likert scale; Likert, 1932). Those are examples of self-report measures of attitudes that will be referred to as explicit attitudes in this chapter. When attitudes are measured by asking people explicitly how the object of interest is liked, respondents are usually able to answer this question. However, the outcome is also subject to impression management and may not cover all aspects like spontaneous affective reactions. To eliminate effects of social desirability on attitude measures social psychologist developed several "tricks".