Abstract

Human beings react to their environments in an evaluative fashion. They love and protect their kin and strive to maintain positive evaluations of themselves as well as those around them. They evaluate others' attractiveness. They also evaluate and select leaders, decide how to spend their resources, and plan for the futures they envision. Such covert and overt actions often involve judgments about whether objects, events, oneself, and others are favorable or unfavorable, likeable or unlikeable, good or bad. Scholars who study attitudes investigate factors involved in these evaluations;, how they are formed, changed, represented in memory, and translated into cognitions, motivations, and actions.