Why Attitudes Are Not Character Traits

Abstract

In social psychology, explicit and implicit attitudes play an important role for behavior prediction and explanation. Edouard Machery claims that attitudes are not mental states but dispositional character traits. The goal of this article is to show that this conceptualization of attitudes comes with two weaknesses: first, the author will show that if attitudes are traits, they are unmeasurable, or if we assume that a part of the trait is measurable, then we do not need the trait-picture, because then the classic attitude-picture is sufficient. Second, it is unclear how the trait-picture leads to attitudes that explain behavior.