Book Description

Attitudes, Conflict, and Social Change is based on a symposium on attitudes, social change, and intergroup conflict conducted on the University of Maryland campus. The book focuses on the following interrelated topics and issues: (1) The concepts of "attitude" and "attitude change" as they are used in psychological, sociological, and political science research. (2) How people change their attitudes and behavior in response to technological change and broad social currents as well as to specific persuasive communications delivered via the mass media or within an organization or a small group. (3) The role of attitudes and their modification in social change. (4) The role of attitudes in the genesis, the processes, and the outcomes of intergroup conflict at the level of the organization, at different societal levels, and at the international level. (5) The perplexing problems involved in determining how attitudes and overt behavior relate to each other. (6) Relationships between theories of attitude change and action programs designed to change attitudes in various social, cultural, ethnic, and national groups. (7) Relationships between laboratory experiments and field research involving attitude change. (8) The directions that future attitude research might take in order to be most productive with respect to both theory development and applications.