AttitudeBehavior Relations

1
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• First Generation Whether
• To what extent, if at all, are attitudes
  predictive of behavior?
• Second Generation When
• Under what conditions do what kinds of attitudes
  of what kinds of individuals predict what kinds
  of behavior?
• Third Generation How

2
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• First Generation
• The LaPiere study and its implications for the
  field. Remember Wicker (1969). Remember Lewin.
• Campbells situational threshold model

3
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Assume moderately unfavorable attitude
• Low threshold High Thold
• LaPiere reject accept
• Campbell accept reject
• pseudo-inconsistency
• true inconsistency

4
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Campbells take home point
• The way the attitude is expressed depends on
  certain situational pressures. But the same
  latent acquired behavioral disposition or
  attitude mediates both verbal and overt
  behavioral responses.
• Implication that the reported failure of
  attitudes to predict behavior represented
  pseudo-inconsistencies that should not
  influence our construal of AB relations.

5
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Second Generation When
• Under what conditions do what kinds of attitudes
  of what kinds of individuals predict what kinds
  of behavior?
• Rationale identifying moderating variables
  contributes to our understanding of the processes
  involved in going from attitudes to behavior.

6
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Conditions Situational moderators (normative
  concerns)
• Theory of reasoned action and theory of planned
  behavior (Fishbein Ajzen)
• Assumptions people are quite rational and make
  systematic use of info available to them. When an
  appropriate measure of intention is obtained, it
  provides the most accurate prediction of
  behavior. Goal of reasoned action model to
  understand and predict social behavior.

7
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• BI and B Relations regulated by BI
• Measures must be specific and in correspondence.
• Brief time interval between measurement of BI and
  observation of B.
• B under persons volitional control.
• the longer the interval, the more likely Att
  will exert direct influence on B. Intentions less
  stable across time than Atts.

8
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Determinants of BI Attitude and SN, and relative
  importance.
• Relationship to underlying belief structures.
• BBI
• BI Aactw1 SNw2
• Aact Bi x ai (summed, i1 to N)
• SN NBi x MCi (summed, i1 to N)
• External variables Link to B moderated by Aact,
  SN, and BI.

9
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Bowman Fishbein (1978)
• Concerns about Reasoned Action
• Scope the approach does not address cases where
  we want to know if a global attitude predicts a
  specific behavior (e.g., symbolic racism and
  opposition to school busing). Represents a
  measurement solution to A-B relations that does
  not deal with such cases.

10
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Abelson It seems like throwing out the baby
  and clinging tenaciously to the bathwater.
• Adopting Aact represents a loss in explanatory
  power, but a gain in the precision of measurement
  and prediction.
• 2. Are the effects of A and SN on B fully
  mediated by BI, or can they influence B
  separately from their influence on BI?
  Regulatory role played by BI.

11
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• 3. Instability of BI its strength may lie in
  its ability to predict immediate behavior.
  Otherwise, more dependent on social situations
  and contingencies than A. If As more stable and
  stronger than BI, then As and past B should have
  more predictive power as time interval increases.
  
• 4. Limited degree of volitional control over
  behavior. Less control if B depends on the
  presence of appropriate opportunities or adequate
  resources (time, , skill).

12
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Other concerns
• Interrelationship between A and Sn.
  Multicolinearity problem?
• BI and B correlating two measures of the same
  attitude? Given specificity of measures, are you
  correlating behavioral measures of attitude with
  a behavioral self-report measure?
• What about effects of behavioral beliefs about
  alternative behaviors? Increase predictability.
  Having an abortion vs. having the child (Smetana
  Adler)

13
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Theory of Planned Behavior addition of perceived
  behavioral control the persons belief as to how
  easy or difficult performance of the behavior is
  likely to be.
• Extension of reasoned action deals with Bs
  that are not under volitional control.
• Armitage Conner (2001) meta analysis

14
(No Transcript)
15
(No Transcript)
16
(No Transcript)
17
(No Transcript)
18
(No Transcript)
19
(No Transcript)
20
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• 2nd Generation of A-B relations research
• Conditions (situational moderators)
• Attitudes (predictor moderators)
• Individuals (personal moderators)
• Behavior (criterion moderators)

21
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Third Generation How
• How and by what psychological mechanisms do
  attitudes guide behavior?
• To improve the accuracy of prediction of specific
  action tendencies, it is necessary to examine the
  processes whereby attitudes guide behavior.
• Deliberative (reasoned action/planned behavior)
  vs. automatic processing models (Fazios MODE
  model and other automatic activation models).

22
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Civilization advances by extending the number of
  operations we can perform without thinking about
  them. Alfred North Whitehead
• Influence of attitudes on behavior is conscious
  and deliberate (reasoned action, planned
  behavior).
• Example attitude strength study by Holland,
  Verplanken, Van Knippenberg (2002).

23
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Not direct evidence of process, but strong
  attitudes (evals retrieved from memory easier to
  retrieve) guide weak attitudes
  (attitudes-as-temporary constructions) follow.
• Strong attitudes (more certain, personally
  relevant, etc.) less susceptible to survey
  context effects (Lavine, et al, 1998).

24
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• But there are times when behavior is more
  reflexive than reflective, and situational
  stimuli elicit B automatically.
• Bargh, Chen, Burrows (1996)
• language proficiency study perform sentence
  completion task (30 sets of 5 words each form
  grammatical English sentence using 4 of 5).

25
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• 2. For half, embedded within these 150 words,
  were many words stereotypically associated with
  the elderly gray, wrinkle, Florida, bingo.
  Primed (mentally activates a concept, made
  accessible) concept of elderly.
• 3. Other half exposed to neutral words not
  associated with elderly. Thanked and thought
  study was over.

26
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• 4. 2nd E covertly timed how long it took each
  participant to walk from the threshold of the lab
  to the elevator down the hall.
• H merely activating the concept of elderly would
  make those participants automatically mimic how
  they habitually behave around the elderly, and
  thus walk more slowly down the hallway.

27
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Key finding participants who were primed took 13
  seconds longer to walk to the elevator.
• Presumably unaware of the priming effect.
• Other exs. of automatic activation effects
• ?activating traits of rudeness or intelligence
  led to people behaving more assertively or
  performing better on tests of general knowledge.

28
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• ?activating goal of achievement led to people
  persevering longer on difficult tasks.
• ?(Dijksterhuis van Knippenberg, 1998)
• Primed students either with a social category
  associated with intellectual accomplishment
  (professors), or with one noted for refined
  habits of mind (soccer hooligans).
• Those primed with professor cues did better on
  test of general knowledge than those primed with
  cues associated with soccer hooligans.

29
Attitude-Behavior Relations

• Rudman Borgida (1995) The afterglow of
  construct accessibility Behavioral consequences
  of priming men to view women as sexual objects.
• Procedure
• Pretests
• Market research
• Lexical decision task
• Interview
• Results