Attitudes and Behavior
Attitudes refer to individuals' evaluations and feelings toward people, objects, and ideas, while behavior encompasses the actions and responses that individuals exhibit. In psychology, the relationship between attitudes and behavior is a key area of study, exploring how attitudes influence behavior and the factors that mediate this relationship. Understanding this connection is crucial for predicting and influencing human actions.
7 Key excerpts on "Attitudes and Behavior"
eBook - ePubThe Psychology of Influence
Theory, research and practice
- Joop Pligt, Michael Vliek(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...All these are evaluative responses that fall under the generic heading ‘attitude’. To put it another way, attitudes refer to people’s evaluative responses – positive or negative – to a stimulus, the so-called attitude object. An attitude object can be a person (a politician, your landlord, yourself), an organisation (the tax authority, social services) or a situation (a party, a lesson at school), but also a product (food, cosmetics) or an idea (halting immigration, raising the motorway speed limit). Defined in this way, it seems logical that attitudes directly relate to behaviour: people in the UK with a positive attitude towards the Conservative Party and a negative attitude towards Labour are more likely to vote Conservative, right? Even though the answer is quite likely yes, it isn’t as straightforward as it seems, which is why the study of attitudes and attitude change has one of the longest histories in social psychology (for a review, see Briñol & Petty, 2012). Indeed, one of the founders of social psychology, Gordon Allport (1935), went so far as to call attitudes the single most indispensable concept in the field. The origins of research in this field date back to the 1920s and 1930s, and in its early days it was concerned primarily with attitude measurement (Bogardus, 1925; Thurstone & Chave, 1929; Likert, 1932), with the initial discussion revolving around whether or not they are actually measurable (Thurstone’s famous article of 1928 is entitled ‘Attitudes can be measured’). There was also interest in how attitudes affect behaviour, with LaPiere (1934) providing a classic example. In an era in which negative racial stereotypes about Chinese people were prevalent, he visited a number of restaurants in the southern United States in the company of a Chinese man and woman. As a rule, they were welcomed and served normally. Six months later he sent the same establishments a questionnaire asking, among other things, whether they accepted Chinese guests...
eBook - ePubSocial Psychology
Fourth Edition
- Eliot R. Smith, Diane M. Mackie, Heather M. Claypool(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Yet this relationship is not one on which we can routinely rely. Attitudes are just one of the factors that have to come to mind to influence perceptions, intentions, plans, and, ultimately, behavior. Figure 8.6 When do attitudes guide behavior? For attitudes to guide behavior, several processes must occur. Most important, the attitude must come to mind, either intentionally or automatically. If an attitude that comes to mind also meets the additional conditions shown, attitude-consistent behavior is a likely result. As researchers continue to specify the conditions under which attitudes do influence behavior, however, their findings also reaffirm their optimism. Knowing how attitudes influence behavior means that we can have some control over when they do. Such knowledge has important personal and societal consequences. Recall from Chapter 5 that in their battle against prejudice and discrimination, some individuals try to inhibit the impact of their initial responses and consciously bring to bear more egalitarian attitudes. Similar processes could be involved when managers evaluate workers’ performance and when jury members form impressions on which they acquit or convict defendants. The research described in this chapter suggests ways both to suppress the influence of some attitudes and to increase the influence of others. When we want attitudes to be potent, they must come to mind readily and be related to the behavioral options at hand. Weak connections between attitude and object, competition from other attitudes, and a lack of control over the desired behavior will all reduce the impact of attitudes on behaviors. Of course, the influence of social norms can also reduce this impact. Social norms often conflict with people’s personal inclinations. Yet, information about others’ standards of appropriateness is vital for effective social functioning—so vital that these standards often override personal attitudes to determine social behavior...
eBook - ePubPredicting and Changing Behavior
The Reasoned Action Approach
- Martin Fishbein, Icek Ajzen(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...General Attitudes and the Prediction of Behavior 1 As we noted in Chapter 3, more than any other construct, attitude occupies a central role in social psychological theory and research. In the early days of attitude research, most investigators accepted as a given that human behavior is guided by social attitudes. In fact, the field of social psychology was originally defined as the scientific study of attitudes (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918; Watson, 1925) because it was assumed that attitude was the key to understanding human behavior. Early work with the attitude construct gave no reason to doubt this assumption. Applying newly developed methods to assess attitudes, it was shown that groups known to differ in their patterns of behavior in a given domain also held correspondingly different attitudes. Thus, for example, divinity students were found to hold more favorable attitudes toward the church than other college students (Thurstone & Chave, 1929); military training groups, veterans, and conservative political groups had more favorable attitudes toward war than labor groups and professional men (Stagner, 1942); and businessmen were found to be more opposed to the prohibition of alcohol than were Methodists (Smith, 1932; see also Bird, 1940). Indeed, in his influential early review of the attitude literature, Allport (1935) stated that “the concept of attitude is probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology. No other term appears more frequently in experimental and theoretical literature… This … concept has been so widely adopted that it has virtually established itself as the keystone in the edifice of American social psychology” (p...
eBook - ePubSocial Psychology
The Study of Human Interaction
- Theodore M. Newcomb, Ralph H. Turner, Philip E. Converse(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...It is in this sense that the influence of attitudes upon component psychological processes is hard to distinguish from the influence on what is generally thought of as "behavior." In such a sense, the dividing line between implicit and explicit (or overt) behavior becomes rather inconsequential.OverviewOur goal in this chapter has been to expand our understanding of what attitudes are and what they can be seen as doing in the total psychological organization of the individual over time.By way of indicating what attitudes are, we have limited the keyformal properties of the attitudes to the direction and the degree of feeling associated with a specified object. We have also singled out a few key properties of attitude objects, such as their inclusiveness, centrality, or status as social objects. At the same time, we have seen that attitudes have rather far-reaching effects, both on the "output" side in overt behavior and on the "input" side where the acquisition of information is concerned. Oft-cited instances in which the attitude-behavior relationship seems weak or even contradicted must generally be understood in terms of the facts that (1) behavior is ajointfunction of the situation and of the attitudes the individual brings to the situation; and (2) situations of any complexity render a number of attitudes relevant at the same time, so that once the situation is specified, behavior is some resultant of several relevant attitudes at once.There are two propositions concerning information input which, it juxtaposed, may seem to have rather odd logical implications. The first is that where information is incomplete, the individual tends to carry away from the situation "new" information that supports his preexisting attitudes. Second, such successful input of supportive information increases the degree of his attitude in the same direction...
eBook - ePub- Anthony R. Pratkanis, Steven J. Breckler, Anthony G. Greenwald, Anthony R. Pratkanis, Steven J. Breckler, Anthony G. Greenwald(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of attitudes is itself not a reason for concluding that attitudes are important in explaining social behavior. As Bem (1967) suggested, attitudes might be cognitive illusions that are constructed after the fact of behavior. Attitudes Predict Behavior Toward Their Objects An important, early critique of the usefulness of attitudes in predicting behavior was given by LaPiere (1934). (Problems with LaPiere’s critique are reviewed later in this chapter.) Thirty years later, Festinger (1964) critically noted the lack of published support for the reasonable expectation that changes in attitudes should lead to changes in behavior toward their objects. Subsequently, Wicker (1969) reviewed a body of research that revealed only weak correlations between measures of attitudes and measures of behavior toward their objects. In the 1970s and 1980s two major programs of research succeeded in clarifying attitude-behavior relations. The first of these, directed by Martin Fishbein and lcek Ajzen (e.g., 1974; see chap. 10 in this volume), demonstrated that attitude and behavior are correlated (a) when the observed behavior is judged to be relevant to the attitude, (b) when attitude and behavior are observed at comparable levels of specificity, and (c) when mediation of the attitude-behavior relation by behavioral intentions is taken into account. The second major program, directed by Russell Fazio (e.g., 1986; see chap. 7 in this volume), showed that attitude and behavior, and changes therein, are correlated (a) when the attitude is based on direct experience with the attitude object, and (b) to the extent that the attitude is cognitively accessible. Although the successful Fishbein–Ajzen and Fazio research programs have established that attitudes can and do predict behavior toward their objects, these programs have also placed important qualifying conditions on the attitude-behavior relationship...
eBook - ePub- Gregory R. Maio, Bas Verplanken, Geoffrey Haddock(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...4 How Do Attitudes Influence Behavior? Questions to Ponder How do attitudes predict deliberative behavior? How do attitudes predict spontaneous behavior? What are habits and how do they influence behavior? Do we need attitudes if we have habits? Preview In the previous chapter, we explored the issue of when attitudes predict behavior. In addition to addressing when attitudes predict behavior, social psychologists have developed a number of models to explain how attitudes predict behavior. In this chapter, we introduce what we perceive to be the most prominent models of attitude–behavior relations: Fishbein and Azjen’s (1975) Theory of Reasoned Action, its extension, the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), Fazio’s (1990) MODE Model, and Eagly and Chaiken’s (1993, 1998) Composite Model. For each model, we describe the basic tenets of the model and highlight research that has tested it. A lot of this research has focused on trying to predict diverse behaviors that are notoriously difficult to change or controversial in some way (e.g., using condoms to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease), which testifies to the importance of this research topic. The Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behavior As its name suggests, the Theory of Reasoned Action was developed to predict reasoned, deliberative (i.e., planned) behavior. According to this model (see Figure 4.1), the immediate predictor (or determinant) of individuals’ behavior is their intention. An intention represents a motivation to act. Put simply, the idea is that if, for example, you intend to recycle empty bottles, you are likely to engage in this behavior. Within the original conceptualization of the model, intentions were determined by two factors: attitudes and subjective norms...
eBook - ePub- Gershon Tenenbaum, Robert C. Eklund, Gershon Tenenbaum, Robert C. Eklund(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Fishbein, M. (1967). Attitude and the prediction of behavior. In M. Fishbein (Ed.), Readings in attitude theory and measurement (pp. 477–492). New York, NY: Wiley. Fishbein, M. (1993). Introduction. In D. J. Terry, C. Gallois, & M. McCamish (Eds.), The Theory of Reasoned Action: Its Application to AIDS‐preventive behaviour (pp. xv–xxv). Oxford: Pergamon. Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior. New York, NY: Wiley. Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (2010). Predicting and changing behavior: The reasoned action approach. New York, NY: Psychology Press. French, D. P., & Hankins, M. (2003). The expectancy‐value muddle in the theory of planned behaviour—and some proposed solutions. British Journal of Health Psychology, 8, 37–55. Galea, M. N., & Bray, S. R. (2006). Predicting walking intentions and exercise in individuals with intermittent claudication: An application of the theory of planned behaviour. Rehabilitation Psychology, 51, 299–305. Gardner, B. (2015). A review and analysis of the use of “habit” in understanding, predicting and influencing health‐related behaviour. Health Psychology Review, 9, 277–295. Godin, G., Conner, M., & Sheeran, P. (2005). Bridging the intention‐behavior “gap”: The role of moral norm. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 497–512. Godin, G., & Kok, G. (1996). The theory of planned behavior: A review of its applications to health‐related behaviors. American Journal of Health Promotion, 11, 87–98. Greve, W. (2001). Traps and gaps in action explanation: Theoretical problems of a psychology of human action. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 435–451. Hagger, M. S., Chan, D. K. C., Protogerou, C., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2016)...
