These theories sought to explain phenomena initially considered profoundly social, motivational, and non-conscious in more exclusively individual, cognitive, and conscious terms. Perhaps most prominent was the rapid spread of interest, noted earlier, in Bem's (1965, 1967) highly “behavioristic” formulation of self-perception theory (which constituted a kind of “hostile takeover” of the dissonance theory enterprise) and in Kelley's (1967, 1972) rather abstract attribution theory