Two Responses to the Objection to the Tripartite Model

Opponents of the tripartite model rightly reject the traditional formulation of it for the reasons articulated above, namely, because of the attitude-behavior inconsistency where an expected behavioral response need not occur in every circumstance where the relevant attitude becomes salient.170 _{Empirical evidence suggests the possibility of inconsistency}

between any combination of belief, affect, and behavior. That is to say, these alleged “components” can and do come apart in our attitude taking. One still has an attitude of sorts when behaving as if one’s clunker car is safe, even when does not feel or believe so (e.g., driving the car despite fears about its reliability), and vice versa.

There are two promising responses available to the pro-tripartite theorist. First, the tripartite theorist might deny the behavioral-attitude relation is one of “definitional                                                                                                                

170 _{From what Zanna and Rempel say, it appears they think the attitude-affect relation can come apart too.} They regard attitude as an evaluative notion: “We regard an attitude as the categorization of a stimulus object along an evaluative dimension based upon, or generated from, three general classes of information, and/or (3) information concerning past behaviors or behavioral intentions” (2008, p. 9).

necessity” in the sense the objection assumes. This response, though, considers behavioral components not as necessary manifestations. Instead, attitudes involve behavioral

dispositions. Consider a sixteen-year-old girl, call her Abigail, who is grateful to her parents

for all their love and care, including the sacrifices they make on her behalf. However, we might suppose that Abigail is in the middle of a heated argument with her parents about her curfew. Abigail wants her curfew moved back to 1:00 a.m. from the usual 11:00 p.m. “Nothing good happens after midnight. We don’t want anything to happen to you,” her parents say. From a parent’s perspective, the fact that they care enough to set reasonable action (behavioral) constraints qualifies as grounds for gratitude (or appreciation). Obviously, Abigail does not see it that way. Instead, she sees the curfew rules as unreasonable. It would seem that Abigail is still grateful toward her parents even though her occurrent feelings fail to match up with her attitude. This suggests that we should at least sometimes think of attitudes in dispositional terms, rather than simply as (mere) episodes. Sometimes circumstances arise such that an object’s dispositions are masked and sometimes dispositions fail to manifest in circumstances normally conducive to their manifestation. A good free throw is disposed to making free throws in normal circumstances, which would exclude shooting in gale force winds.171 _{Even the best free}

throw shooters miss an occasional free throw. The disposition to feel angry when insulted involves feeling anger in response to being insulted in normal circumstances. And even the angry sometimes surprise with a calm response to that which typically makes elicits anger. Chicken eggs are typically fragile; they are disposed to breaking in normal circumstances                                                                                                                

171 _{John Greco (2006) says, for instance, that Derek Jeter’s reliability as a baseball hitter does not require good} hitting on the moon. See John Greco, Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

when struck. However, place a sufficiently protective covering over an egg and it can withstand a drop from several feet off the ground when it normally would not. Understood as a disposition, rather than an actual manifestation, we could then characterize the behavioral component as necessary to attitudes without necessarily incurring the problems traditional tripartite models face. That one never has the “opportunity” to manifest her attitude in behavior may simply be a function of one’s circumstances. The plausibility of this response does not rely on the possibility of a “fractured” theory on which some attitudes come with behavioral components and others do not.

However, this response seems to somewhat miss the force of the original objection to the tripartite model. For we could imagine one adopting an attitude toward some object without ever manifesting behavioral dispositions normally associated with the attitude, and not because one hasn’t the opportunity to manifest them. Consider a frightened citizen living under a totalitarian regime. This citizen strongly disagrees with the despot’s policies and resents his callousness toward the needy population. The citizen could, in some sense (though coerced), convey her resentment. To manifest her attitude toward the regime, though, would put the citizen’s life in danger. As a result, the citizen never behaves in a way that comports with her attitude. You might say, “Well, look, the citizen undoubtedly has other attitudes that entail certain behavioral dispositions that outweigh the citizen’s attitude toward the totalitarian regime.” Maybe, but nothing obviously rules out the conceptual possibility of a person never manifesting the types of behavior typically associated with certain attitudes. The citizen might, for instance, not be one to ever exhibit resentment. Would that mean the citizen did not resent (or have an attitude at all) toward the regime? Seems unlikely.

Perhaps, as most contemporary social psychologists think, behavior is too often an unreliable indicator of our attitudes for the correct model to include a behavioral component. Respecting the dominant view, one might, technically speaking, reject the tripartite model by rejecting the behavioral component, while still acknowledging how much influence attitudes often have on our behavior toward the objects of our attitudes. According to this response, attitudes typically consist of cognitive and affective components—still understood dispositionally—that typically (or often) affect the behavior of the person to whom the attitude belongs. This response obviously takes the objection seriously, but in a way that does not completely sever the attitude-behavior connection, thus in a sense respecting tripartite intuitions. Attitudes, especially propositional attitudes, help us to make sense of (and explain) people’s behavior and actions, even if no attitude entails any set of behavioral dispositions. This final dual-component response is highly plausible and, in some form or other, enjoys support in the empirically-based social psychology literature.

Sometimes, however, the way we feel in response to an attitude object fails to match our thoughts about the object. So, for example, one might think (or be disposed to think) of garden snakes as harmless creatures, but feel fear when confronted with one, perhaps even running. Such a person’s thoughts, on the one hand, and feelings and behavior, on the other, intuitively exhibit different attitudes. Perhaps one in this position has no clear attitude either way. The matter is much clearer, though, concerning the attitude-behavior relationship in that one might clearly take an attitude toward some object despite behaving as if one does not.