Respondents are asked to choose where their position lies, on a set of scales with polar adjectives (for example: "sweet - bitter", "fair - unfair", "warm - cold").

[12] David R. Heise's Surveying Cultures[13] provides a contemporary update with special attention to measurement issues when using computerized graphic rating scales.

The bipolar adjective pairs can be used for a wide variety of subjects, and as such the scale is called by some "the ever ready battery" of the attitude researcher.

This OSS design had meant to increase the sensitivity of the SD method to any semantic biases in responses of people within the same culture and educational background.

[16][17] Five items (five bipolar pairs of adjectives) have been proven to yield reliable findings, which highly correlate with alternative Likert numerical measures of the same attitude.

[18] In 1958, as part of the MK Ultra program, the CIA gave Osgood $192k to finance a world-wide study of 620 key words in 30 cultures using semantic differential.

Semantic differential was used to identify words that would most effectively engender a negative attitude in the Chilean population toward the socialist Allende administration.

Osgood’s theoretical work also bears affinity to linguistics and general semantics and relates to Korzybski's structural differential.

Subsequently, we might extend our initial classification to include cases of persons who actively threaten us or represent only a potential danger, and so on.

The studies of Osgood and his colleagues revealed that the evaluative factor accounted for most of the variance in scalings, and related this to the idea of attitudes.

[16][23][24] Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman's doctoral thesis was on the subject of the Semantic Differential.