Book excerpt: "This is a revolutionary book. Rokeach seriously questions the vast research on attitudes and attitude change as well as some of the well-known theories in this area. And—perhaps more crucially—he documents the need to replace the delimited concern for attitudes with a systematic and organized theory about values. Rokeach provides theoretical and reach substance and meaning to the previously scattered thought about beliefs, attitudes, and values. In doing so, he opens new avenues of understanding about man's values, and he documents the necessary new directions in research. "Belief, Attitudes, and Values represents and elaboration of my continuing interest in the nature of belief systems. The title reflects my view that an understanding of man's beliefs, attitudes, and values will not come unless we are willing to distinguish these concepts from one another and to employ them in distinctively different ways. The subtitle conveys my view that beliefs, attitudes, and values are nonetheless interrelated and form a functionally integrative cognitive system. "With the framework of a person-centered theory of belief systems, I present a systematic way of thinking about the problems that gave not been satisfactory handles in social psychology. there is little consensus about exactly what we mean when we speak of belief, and an attitude, a value, a value system...We are a long way from understanding the theoretical relationship between attitudes and behavior, between attitude change and behavioral change, and we have not yet learned how to predict accurately one from the other. "The majority of experimental findings on attitude change have little to do with attitude change, since the findings can be more simply accounted for on other grounds. The literature on attitude change does not seem to serve the interests of the educator and therapist nearly so much as it serves the interest of specialized persuaders in advertising, the mass media, politics, and public relations."-Publisher.