Consislency Among Humanilarian and Helping Alliludes"

Five attitudes were defined factorially from subjects ' responses (n = 489) to a 91-item inventory cover-ing a variety of altruistic themes and attitude objects. Helping, social-responsibility, and procriminal factors were moderately associated; nontraditional humanitarian (mainly sex progressivism) and pro-animal factors had weak, although significant, correlations with other attitudes. Women expressed greater altruism than men, except on nontraditional humanitarianism (reversal significant at p <.0001). Sub-jects who scored low on Dogmatism and F Scales were more consistent than dogmatic (authoritarian) Ss, according to two statistics: (a) an individual dispersion index reflecting amount of spread among the five attitude scores (pro-con dimension); (b) correlational differences between authoritarian and non-authoritarian subgroups, for all /0 attitude pairs. Applicability of the consistency principle to status quo attitude organization was discussed. The chief tenet of cognitive consistency theory is that people strive to keep harmony among their various beliefs, ideas, intentions, etc. The principle has wide application to the study of social attitudes. Specific consistency models have been developed for explaining cognitive processes underlying attitude change (Cohen, 1964). The theory also pertains to cognitive or-ganization, that is, to the status quo relations among components within a single attitude, or between separate (allied) attitudes (Jones and Gerard, 1967; McGuire, 1969). Two lines of attitude-organization research are suggested. The first examines cognitive, affective, and conative aspects of behavior directed toward one attitude object. Such inquiries are ex-emplified by Fishbein's (1963; 1967a) work on beliefs and attitudes, and by studies of the cor-respondence between verbal attitudes and over