Commentary: Not all attitudes are created equal

stimuli.’ 1 Alas, if that statement were only regularly honoured. Instead, as LaPierre goes on to note, ‘But by derivation social attitudes are seldom more than a verbal response to a symbolic situation’. Let us note that LaPierre was writing those statements 75 years ago. Nothing has changed, and social psychologists continue to observe and fret about the fact that ‘attitudes’ do not necessarily relate to ‘behaviour’. As LaPierre’s opening statement makes clear that that idea is nonsense because attitudes are behaviour. Or, perhaps a bit more accurately, attitudes are inferred from behaviour, and only from behaviour. The whole issue hinges on one’s ideas about just what constitutes ‘behaviour’ and whether one wants to divide behaviour into the two categories of ‘what people