<P> In 1928 Louis Leon Thurstone published an article titled "Attitudes Can Be Measured" in it he proposed an elaborate procedure to assess people's views on social issues . Attitudes can be difficult to measure because measurement is arbitrary, because attitudes are ultimately a hypothetical construct that cannot be observed directly . </P> <P> But many measurements and evidence proofed scales are used to examine attitudes . A Likert scale taps agreement or disagreement with a series of belief statements . The Guttman scale focuses on items that vary in their degree of psychological difficulty . The semantic differential uses bipolar adjectives to measure the meaning associated with attitude objects . Supplementing these are several indirect techniques such as unobtrusive, standard physiological, and neuroscientific measures . Following the explicit - implicit dichotomy, attitudes can be examined through direct and indirect measures . </P> <P> Whether attitudes are explicit (i.e., deliberately formed) versus implicit (i.e., subconscious) has been a topic of considerable research . Research on implicit attitudes, which are generally unacknowledged or outside of awareness, uses sophisticated methods involving people's response times to stimuli to show that implicit attitudes exist (perhaps in tandem with explicit attitudes of the same object). Implicit and explicit attitudes seem to affect people's behavior, though in different ways . They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases they are . The relationship between them is poorly understood . </P> <P> Explicit measures tend to rely on self - reports or easily observed behaviors . These tend to involve bipolar scales (e.g., good - bad, favorable - unfavorable, support - oppose, etc .). Explicit measures can also be used by measuring the straightforward attribution of characteristics to nominate groups . Explicit attitudes that develop in response to recent information, automatic evaluation were thought to reflect mental associations through early socialisation experiences . Once formed, these associations are highly robust and resistant to change, as well as stable across both context and time . Hence the impact of contextual influences was assumed to be obfuscate assessment of a person's "true" and enduring evaluative disposition as well as limit the capacity to predict subsequent behavior . Likert scales and other self - reports are also commonly used . </P>

Which one is not the characteristic of the theory of reasoned action