ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

■ Kelly has strong values, but you wouldn’t guess this by observing her in everyday situations. She is charming, likeable, and adept at getting along with different kinds of people. Her friends sometimes call her a chameleon. Yet Kelly has strong views on certain issues, notably the environment and protecting endangered species. At a party, conversation turns to politics and several people advocate drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Will Kelly take issue with their position? ■ Susan is an agnostic, a skeptic who has doubts about the existence of God, and

believes religion is of little use in today’s society. She is a strong believer in Darwinian evolution, a forceful critic of creationist philosophy. At the same time, Susan has a soft spot for religion because it means a lot to her dad. An old friend of her dad’s calls one day. He’s been teaching Sunday school, but will be out of town next week when the class is scheduled to discuss the beauty of God’s creation of the universe. He asks whether Susan would mind filling in for him just this once. Will Susan agree?

What is your best guess? Do these anecdotes remind you of people you know or conflicts you’ve experienced? These two examples are fictitious, but are based on factors studied in actual psychological experiments. They also focus on a central issue in attitude research—the connection between attitudes and behavior. The question is of theoretical and practical importance.

Theoretically, attitudes are assumed to predispose people to behave in certain ways. For example, suppose we found that attitudes had no impact on behavior. There would be less reason to study attitudes in depth. We would be better advised to spend our time exploring behavior. From a practitioner’s perspective, attitudes are important only if they predict behavior. Who cares what consumers think about fast food or fast cars if their attitudes don’t forecast what they buy? On the other hand, if attitudes do forecast behavior, it becomes useful for marketers to understand people’s attitudes toward

commercial products. Then there’s us. The people watcher—intuitive psychologist—in us all is intrigued by the attitude–behavior relationship. We can all think of times when we did not practice what we preached. You probably know people who frequently say one thing and do another. The research discussed in this section sheds light on these issues.

The discussion that follows examines conditions under which people are likely to display attitude–behavior consistency. A subsequent section introduces theories of the attitude–behavior relationship. The final part of the chapter views consistency in a larger perspective.

Historical Background

It is morning in America, 1933. President Roosevelt is hard at work in Washington, DC, trying to harness the forces of government to get the country moving again. It’s a daunting task. Depression and frustration are adrift in the land. People are unemployed, and some take out their anger on minorities. A psychologist, Richard LaPiere, is aware of the prejudice that one ethnic group, located in his home state of California, faces. He decides to examine the relationship between behavior and attitudes toward the Chinese. Accompanied by a personable Chinese couple, LaPiere stops at restaurants and hotels across America. Much to his surprise, the group is served at all but one of the restaurants or hotels. But when he sends out questionnaires asking if owners would accept members of the Chinese race as guests in their establishments, over 91 percent of those surveyed offer a highly prejudiced reply, “No” (LaPiere, 1934).

The findings surprise LaPiere and attract the attention of scholars. It appears as if behavior (serving the Chinese) is out of whack with attitude (questionnaire responses). For years, LaPiere’s findings dominate the field. Researchers conclude that attitudes do not predict behavior, and some researchers recommend that we discard the term attitude entirely (Wicker, 1969). These conclusions characterize the field of attitude research for a time and still typify viewpoints you might hear or read about today. When someone informally laments that people never act on their plans or that acquaintances believe one thing, but always do something very different, she is echoing sentiments that date back to LaPiere.

But hold the cell phone! It turns out that LaPiere’s study had a number of problems. First, the people who waited on the Chinese couple were not those who filled out the questionnaires. Second, the survey probed intention to serve a Chinese couple, but the behavioral measure involved serving a personable Chinese couple accompanied

by an educated Caucasian man. Tempted as they probably were to refuse the Chinese couple, their prejudice was tempered by the presence of a presumably well-dressed White man. Third, the study did not properly measure attitude, neglecting to tap the global, evaluative aspects of attitude with a validated scale.

In addition, when researchers systematically examined the relationship between atti - tude and behavior over the ensuing decades, they found that LaPiere’s study was an anomaly. Most surveys reported significant correlations between attitudes and behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, 2010; Kim & Hunter, 1993).

But give the early scholars their due. They correctly observed that attitudes do not always predict behavior. They called attention to the fact that attitudes do not fore - cast action nearly as well as one might assume on the basis of common sense. But they threw out the attitudinal baby with the dirty behavioral bath water! Sure, attitudes do not always predict what we will do. But that does not mean they aren’t useful guides or reasonable predictors, given the incredible complexity of everyday life. The con - sensus of opinion today is that attitudes do influence action; they predispose people toward certain behavioral choices, but not all the time. Under some conditions, attitudes forecast behavior; in other circumstances they do not. The relationship between atti - tude and behavior is exquisitely complex.

Now here’s the good news: We can identify the factors that moderate the attitude– behavior relationship. Key variables are: (a) aspects of the situation, (b) characteristics of the person, and (c) qualities of the attitude (Fazio & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 1994; Zanna & Fazio, 1982).

Situational Factors

The context—the situation we’re in—exerts a powerful impact on behavior. We are not always aware of how our behavior is subtly constrained by norms, roles, and a desire to do the socially correct thing. A norm is an individual’s belief about the appropriate behavior in a situation. Roles are parts we perform in everyday life, socially prescribed functions like professor, student, parent, child, and friend.

Norms and roles. Individuals may hold an attitude, but choose not to express the attitude because it would violate a social norm. You may not like an acquaintance at work, but realize that it violates conventional norms to criticize the person to his face. Someone may harbor prejudice toward co-workers, but be savvy enough to know that she had better hold her tongue lest she get in trouble on the job (Kiesler, Collins, & Miller, 1969).

Norms vary across cultures. In traditional Middle Eastern societies, friendly, outgoing behavior can be held in low repute. Gregarious behavior that is regarded positively in the United States (“Hey, how ya’ doin’?”) may be viewed negatively in some Middle Eastern countries. Instead, the norm is to be serious, even somber in public (Yousef, 1982). Thus, a person may hide her affection for a colleague when seeing him at work. Attitude fails to predict behavior because the public display of attitude runs counter to cultural norms.

Roles also influence the attitude–behavior relationship. When people take on profes- sional roles, they have to act the part, putting their biases aside. This helps explain why reporters, who have strong political beliefs, rarely display biases in their professional activity at newspapers or television stations. For example, many Washington reporters are liberal Democrats, but their news stories go right down the middle, offering criticism of Democrat and Republican politicians (Perloff, 2014). One of the requirements of news is that it show no favoritism to either side—that it be perceived as fair and objective. Journalists know that if they write biased news stories, they will quickly lose their jobs or will be viewed as unprofessional by colleagues. Thus, liberal political attitudes do not reliably predict reporters’ public behavior.

Scripts. To illustrate the concept of script, I ask that you imagine you face a term paper deadline and are hard at work at your word processor. A phone rings; it’s a telemarketer, the tenth to call this week. She’s asking for money for injured war veterans, a cause you normally support because a relative got hurt while serving in the Iraq war. Not thinking and mindlessly putting on your “I’m busy, leave me alone” hat, you cut the volunteer off, telling her in no uncertain terms that you have work to do.

Your attitude obviously didn’t come into play here. If it had, you would have promised a donation. Instead, you invoked a script: an “organized bundle of expectations about an event sequence” or an activity (Abelson, 1982, p. 134). Like an actor who has memorized his lines and says them on cue, you call on well-learned rules about how to handle pushy telemarketers interrupting your day. Your expectations of how the transaction with the telemarketer is going to proceed—the overly pleasant intro, follow- up for money, plea to keep you on the phone—set the tone for the conversation, and you mindlessly follow the script rather than taking the time to consult your attitude toward veterans.

Characteristics of the Person

Individuals differ in the extent to which they display consistency between attitudes and behavior. Some people are remarkably consistent; others are more variable. Social psychological research has helped pinpoint the ways in which personal factors moderate

the attitude–behavior relationship. Two moderating factors are self-monitoring and direct experience.

Self-monitoring. Social psychologist Mark Snyder, whose work we glimpsed earlier, argues that he believes people can be divided into two categories. A first group consists of individuals who are concerned with managing impressions, cultivating images, and displaying appropriate behavior in social situations. Adept at reading situational cues and figuring out the expected behavior at a given place and time, these individuals adjust their behavior to fit the situation. When filling out Snyder’s (1974) scale, they agree that “in different situations and with different people, I often act like very different persons.” These individuals are called high self-monitors because they “monitor the public appearances of self they display in social situations” (Snyder, 1987, pp. 4–5).

A second group is less concerned with fitting into a situation or displaying socially correct behavior. Rather than looking to the situation to figure out how to behave, they consult their inner feelings and attitudes. “My behavior is usually an expression of my true inner feelings, attitudes, and beliefs,” they proudly declare, strongly agreeing with this item in the self-monitoring scale. These individuals are called low self-monitors. High self-monitors exhibit less attitude–behavior consistency than do low self-monitors (Snyder & Kendzierski, 1982; Snyder & Tanke, 1976). High self-monitors look to the situation to decide how to act. As shape-shifting “actor types” who enjoy doing the socially correct thing, they don’t view each and every situation in life as a test of character. If a situation requires that they put their attitudes aside for a moment, they happily do so. Low self-monitors strongly disagree. Living by the credo, “To thine own self be true,” low self-monitors place value on practicing what they preach and main - taining congruence between attitude and behavior. Not to do so would violate a personal canon for low self-monitors.

In the example given earlier, Kelly—the outgoing, chameleon-like young woman who has strong attitudes toward wildlife preservation—would be in a pickle if acquaintances at a party began taking an anti-environmental stand. Her personality description suggests she is a high self-monitor. If so, she would be unlikely to challenge her acquaintances. Instead, she might smile sweetly, nod her head, and resolve to talk up the environmental issue in situations where she could make a difference. Needless to say, a low self- monitor who shared Kelly’s values would be foaming at the mouth when her friends began saying that we should drill for oil in the National Wildlife Refuge. She probably would not hesitate to tell them how she felt.

There are also interesting social media implications here. Some people are highly attuned to how they come off on social media, while others lament the phoniness they

see in others’ profiles. Some teens and young adults in their 20s, tired of striving to match “annoyingly perfect online avatars,” or seeking a little privacy, have set up finstagrams or phony Instagram accounts geared only to friends that offer a more genuine view of themselves (Safronova, 2015, p. D1). Theory suggests that high self- monitors will be highly cognizant of how they come across on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sites, attentive to their image, even strategizing to brand themselves in more image-conscious ways. Low self-monitors, while not unconcerned with their social media presentations, should be less interested than highs with self-branding or what they view as imagey issues. Instead, lows should be more concerned with maintaining consistency between value-expressive-based attitudes and social media posts, tweets, and profiles. The relationship among self-monitoring, persuasion, and social media are complex, and interested readers should also consider refinement, modifications, and analyses of Snyder’s scale that bear on persuasion in social media and other contexts (Briggs, Cheek, & Buss, 1980; Gangestad & Snyder, 2000; Lennox & Wolfe, 1984).

Direct experience. Experience also moderates the attitude–behavior relationship. Some of our attitudes are based on direct experience with an issue; we have encountered the problem in real life, it has evoked strong feelings, or led us to think through the implications of behaving in a certain way. Other attitudes are formed indirectly—from listening to parents or peers, reading books, watching television, or skimming Facebook posts. Attitudes formed through direct experience “are more clearly defined, held with greater certainty, more stable over time, and more resistant to counter influence” than attitudes formed through indirect experience (Fazio & Zanna, 1981, p. 185; see also Millar & Millar, 1996). Attitudes produced by direct experience also come more quickly to mind than attitudes acquired through indirect experiences. For these reasons, people are more apt to translate attitude into behavior when the attitude has been formed through direct experiences in real-world situations (Fazio & Zanna, 1978).

Consider a contemporary example: adolescent drug abuse. Two teenagers may both have negative attitudes toward drug use. One formed her attitude through direct experience: She smoked a lot of marijuana, tried Ecstasy as a high school sophomore, got sick, and found the experience psychologically scary. A teenage guy formed his attitude indirectly, from reading lots of articles warning of harmful effects of drugs and getting the drug rap from parents. During the last week of high school each is tempted to try some drugs at a pulsating pre-graduation party. As she contemplates her decision, the young woman accesses and recalls the negative experiences she had a couple of years back, leading her to reject the offer. Although the guy initially says no, he finds the offer to smoke some weed tempting, his negative attitude less strongly felt, less accessible, and not sufficiently powerful to overcome the allure of a marijuana high. (See Figure 5.3.)

Attitudes based on direct experience are more likely to predict behavior than those formed indirectly. Thus, persuaders can take advantage of people—persuading them to cast their better judgments to the wind—when individuals are uncertain about what they believe or have not thought through their attitudes and beliefs.

Characteristics of the Attitude

As noted in Chapters 3 and 4, attitudes differ in their structure and strength. The nature of an attitude moderates the relationship between attitudes and behavior.

General versus specific attitudes. Ajzen and Fishbein (1977) distinguished between general and highly specific attitudes. A general attitude, the focus of discussion up to this point, is the global evaluation that cuts across different situations. A specific attitude, called attitude toward a behavior, is evaluation of a single act, or specific behavior that takes place in a particular context at a particular time. For example, consider the issue of predicting religious behavior from religious attitudes. The general attitude is the ■ Figure 5.3 A Young Man with a Negative Attitude toward Drugs May Not Translate

Attitude into Behavior If Tempted by Peers and If He Has Little Direct Experience with Drugs to Guide Him

individual’s attitude toward religion. This is the sum total of the person’s evaluations of many religious behaviors, such as praying, attending religious services, partaking in holiday rituals, talking about religion in everyday life, and donating money to religious causes. The specific attitude is the attitude toward one of these behaviors at a particular place and time.

A general attitude, sometimes called attitude toward the object, will not predict each and every religious behavior. A Ph.D. student who is deeply religious may attend only a handful of religious services over the course of 6 months—not because he has abandoned religion, but because he is immersed in doctoral comprehensive exams and realizes he must forsake this part of his religious identity for a time. (To compensate, the student may regularly devote time to reading inspirational portions of the Bible.) The student harbors a favorable attitude toward religion, but rarely, it seems, translates attitude into behavior.

But here’s the rub: If you take the dozens of other religious behaviors in which the student could (and does) partake (from praying to Bible reading), and include them in your equation, you will discover that attitude predicts behavior rather handsomely. This is the conclusion that Fishbein and Ajzen reached in an exhaustive review of this topic. In a 1974 study—old but still good—the investigators asked people to indicate their general religious attitude, as well as how frequently they participated in each of 100 specific religious behaviors. The correlation, or association, between general attitude toward religion and any specific action was 0.15. This is a very small correlation; it means that attitude toward religion is not closely related to a particular behavior in a given situation. But when Fishbein and Ajzen (1974) looked at the overall behavior pattern, focusing not on one situation but rather on the sum total, they discovered that the relationship between attitude toward religion and religious behavior was substantial. The correlation was 0.71, approaching 1 (the latter a perfect correlation).

Other researchers, focusing on different behaviors, have obtained similar findings. For example, Weigel and Newman (1976) found that individuals who had favorable atti - tudes toward environmental preservation were more likely than those with less positive attitudes to participate in a variety of environmental protection projects. The projects included signing petitions opposing construction of nuclear power plants, distributing petitions to family members and friends, and taking part in a roadside litter pickup. The