THE DIMENSIONS UNDERLYING PERCEIVED ATTITUDES - LIBERALISM AND CONCERN FOR TRADITIONAL VALUES

Although there has been extensive research on the structure of actual attitudes, very little attention has been paid to the importance and structure of perceived attitudes. We report two studies directed at identifying and labelling the dimensions people use in judging others' attitudes. In the first study, 50 male and 50 female undergraduates viewed pairs of attitude statements drawn from one of two large sets. For each pair of statements, subjects judged whether or not a person who agreed with one statement in the pair would be likely to agree with the other. Multidimensional scaling analyses yielded similar results for the two sets of statements. Two dimensions, one reflecting liberalism and the other, a concern for traditional values, appear to underlie perceived attitudes. The validity of these dimension labels was confirmed in a second study in which 60 male and 60 female undergraduates rated the characteristics of hypothetical people who agreed strongly with particular statements. We conclude that an understanding of the dimensions underlying perceived attitudes may be important in several areas of social psychological research.