Attitude structure and belief accessibility

Abstract

This article examines the structure of beliefs about abortion and welfare. For each issue, a sample of respondents indicated their agreement with statements about the issues and sorted the statements into groups based on their similarity. These data were used to measure the relations among the statements. For both issues, the sort data revealed a number of topical clusters, while the agreement data revealed a single underlying dimension. The main study examined which belief structures were apparent when respondents answered attitude questions based on the statements in the scaling studies. Respondents were timed as they answered attitude questions about abortion and welfare; responses to agree/disagree items were faster when an item followed another item from the same topical cluster. The distance between successive items on the pro-con dimension affected reaction times for the welfare items but not the items on abortion. We argue that attitudes are structures in long-term memory that encompass linked beliefs about an issue, that the retrieval of beliefs is a component of the process of responding to attitude items, and that retrieving beliefs relevant to one question can activate linked beliefs and thereby facilitate answers to related questions.