There have been times in the history of social psychology when the pre-eminence of attitude theory and research has seemed almost unchallengeable. In the 1930s, the development by Thurstone and others of a methodology of attitude measurement helped social psychology to claim the status of a quantitative science. The 1950s and 1960s saw the Yale studies on communication and persuasion, followed by the flourishing of cognitive consistency and cognitive dissonance theories.

These are not such times. In fact, attitude research might be said, relatively speaking, to have been in decline since the beginning of the 1970s. Some of the reasons for this disenchantment are not hard to identify. The excitement of early assaults in the dissonance vs. self-perception contest gave way to the kind of inconclusive arguing which seemed to fail to retain the interest even of the principal champions of the respective theories. The weak or non-existent correlations in a number of empirical studies which had attempted to predict overt behaviour from measures of general social attitudes (e.g. Wicker 1969) left many researchers with the impression that, whatever attitudes were, there was not much point in studying them if one's main interest was in social behaviour. Fishbein & Ajzen (1975) – of whom more will be said later – have contributed significantly towards correcting this impression, but the predictability of behaviour from attitudes is now very much something that needs to be established in any given context rather than assumed.