Functional attitude theory (FAT) suggests that beliefs and attitudes are influential to various psychological functions. Attitudes can be influential on many processes such as being utilitarian (useful), social, relating to values, or a reduction of cognitive dissonance. They can be beneficial and help people interact with the world. In the late 1950s when psychoanalysis and behaviorism reigned supreme as the foci of psychological studies, Smith, Bruner, and White (1956) and Katz (1960) separately and independently developed typologies of human attitudes in relation to the functions to which they believed the attitudes served. This theory proposes that attitudes are held by individuals because they are important and integral to psychological functioning. The function of an attitude is more important than whether the attitude is accurate or correct.
Background
Aristotle's Rhetoric, renowned for its modes of persuasion in ethos, logos, and pathos, gave mankind its first recorded guide to and theory of social influence. Aristotle recognized that different appeals are necessary for different types of persuasion, and that these appeals can be tailored and refined to better suit the audience or better suit the product or idea at hand. In the late 1950s when psychoanalysis and behaviorism reigned supreme in the U.S. as the foci of psychological studies, Smith, Bruner, and White (1956) and Katz (1960) separately and independently developed typologies of human attitudes in relation to the functions to which they believed the attitudes served. The goal of these ‘functional attitude theories,’ (FAT) as they would come to be known, was to understand the effect of functional attitudinal states in relation cognition and behavior, and specifically, for Katz (1960),> to increase the efficacy of persuasive communications by matching approaches or appeals to the function that the attitude served.
Smith et al. (1956) concentrated on the links between attitudinal states and personality and interviewed ten men regarding their attitude toward the Soviet Union (Carpenter et al., 2013). This logically inductive study was too small to make any binding conclusions, and the study's non-empirical nature meant that it would be dubious as a base for future research, but Smith and colleagues’ foundational theories would go on to inspire and guide future FAT research. Likewise, Katz's (1960) deductive findings did more to explain and define the general concepts of FAT than it did in guiding the methods of future research. In fact, the lack of earlier research on FAT has been linked to both studies’ failure to provide reproducible and falsifiable methods for future research on the theory (Harris & Toledo, 1997; Shavitt & Nelson, 2002). Despite this lack of methodology, both studies contributed to the basic concepts of FAT as it came of age in the 1980s and on.
Concepts
Within FAT, attitudes are considered qualitative variables in relation to the function that they serve. That is, attitudes are the independent variable of a set function (utilitarian, social-adjustive, etc.), which influence both cognition and behavior (dependent variables). Researchers posited that people develop attitudes to serve their goals, and that although any particular attitude might serve multiple functions, it would generally serve one more than the others (Katz, 1960; Smith, Bruner, & White, 1956 ). They theorized that although two people might have an attitude with exactly the same valence, that attitude might serve very different functions for each person. While different attitudes serve different psychological functions, it is imperative to note that they are not mutually exclusive of one another as similar attitudes may be developed for different reasons by different people; it is the aim of FAT to understand why these attitudes develop to better understand how to influence them (Harris & Toledo, 1997). Though different terminology was employed, both Katz (1960) and Smith et al. (1956) conceptualized similar attitude functions: utilitarian, social-adjustive, value-expressive, ego-defensive, and knowledge. These five traditional functional attitudes are defined briefly below, followed by a synthesis of recent "neofunctional" FAT studies, and a brief critique of FAT.