Perspectives on Parsimony: How Long Is the Coast of England? A Reply to Park and MacInnis; Schwarz; Petty; and Lynch

Park and MacInnis provide the always sound advice to examine the boundaries of the focal construct, in this case attitudes. They wonder whether attitudes are capable of predicting differences in levels of personal investment and commitment to resulting behavior, and they question whether attitude dimensions such as strength and extremity, or additional dimensions and moderators, are rich enough to account for either the range of affect intensity reflected in the degree of emotional attachment or in behavioral commitment. Attitudes arise out of a range of human experience extending from direct experience and exposure to internalized information through social interaction and to "hot" emotion-laden responses. Petty's commentary is rich in detail, as befits one who has engaged in a lifetime of research to better understand attitudes. He makes the very useful point that attitude validity checking can occur not only on line but can also result from direct retrieval of validity tags.