Behaviour and Attitudes

An attitude is an evaluative reaction toward a person or thing. Because it is composed of affective, behavioural, and cognitive dimensions, an attitude is an efficient means of assessing one's environment. Attitudes have also proven to be useful constructs for psychological investigation, and have been a key component in social psychological research.

The relationship between attitudes and behaviour is a complex one. Attitudes were commonly thought to determine behaviour, yet social psychologists (e.g., Festinger, 1964) found that attitudes were actually poor predictors of behaviour. Researchers looked to environmental factors to explain why behaviour and attitudes are often inconsistent.

Predicting behaviour from attitudes

One environmental influence on attitudes was the experimental situation itself. Perhaps experimental participants were expressing attitudes they did not really hold in order to create a favourable social impression. By deceiving participants into thinking they were connected to a lie detector called a bogus pipeline (Jones & Sigall, 1971), experimenters were able to show that participants revealed attitudes that were considerably different than when they were not connected to such a device.

Environmental influences on behaviour in a given situation can also obscure the attitude-behaviour link. Researchers reasoned that by aggregating behavioural measures, they could discover how people behave in the average situation, and that attitudes should better predict a person's average behaviour than that in any given single situation. Many researchers (e.g., Kahl & Berman, 1979) have discovered that the effects of attitude on behaviour are more visible if we average many instances of relevant behaviour and then correlate them to attitudes.

Another means of improving the predictive power of attitudes is to ensure that the attitude measured is very specific to the behaviour of interest. In earlier research, a very general attitude (e.g., toward Asian Americans) was used to predict a very specific behaviour (e.g., helping a particular Asian couple [LaPierre, 1934]), with poor results. When the attitude measured is more specific, its power to predict behaviour is improved.

Attitudes can only predict behaviour when people consult them before acting. Many of our daily actions are so routine that they are performed automatically. Researchers have shown that people are more likely to behave in ways that are consistent with their attitudes if they are first prompted to think about their attitudes (e.g., Snyder & Swann, 1976).

Finally, attitudes are more likely to determine behaviour if those attitudes were formed through personal experiences. Fazio and Zanna (1981) found that most students living in a university residence had negative attitudes toward a temporary housing crisis on campus. Only those students who had to wait out the crisis by sleeping on uncomfortable cots, however, were willing to sign petitions or otherwise take action on these attitudes.

Predicting attitudes from behaviour

Another line of social psychological research investigates the prediction of attitudes from behaviour. Many different areas of research provide support for the notion that people's attitudes are often formed as a result of their own behaviour.

Zimbardo (1972) found that people's attitudes were affected by the roles they played in an experiment on prison brutality. Regardless of the fact that students were assigned to play the role of guard or prisoner at random, all of them were carried away in their roles, taking on the attributes they were supposed to be role-playing. Role-playing research shows that we do not simply "play" our roles in life; more often we become them.

A related phenomenon is the "saying-becomes-believing" effect. Researchers such as Tony Higgins have found that students adjust what they are saying to suit the audience, and then adjust their attitudes to suit what they have said. Thus, attitudes follow behaviour.

Attitudes also follow behaviour in "foot-in-the-door" phenomenon. It appears that people are more likely to perform a large act if they are first induced to perform a small one. Cialdini (1978, 1988) investigated a similar phenomenon called the "low-ball-technique", which involves gaining compliance for one action or idea, and then making a larger request. If people only receive the larger request, they are less likely to comply.

The phenomenon of escalating commitment to more extreme acts is seen in both prosocial and antisocial contexts. Research on wartime behaviour, race relations, and social movements all supports the notion that small commitments can be used to obtain compliance to larger ones. Three major theories are used to drive and interpret research on why attitudes follow behaviour: self- presentation, cognitive dissonance, and self-perception.

Self-presentation theory

This theory holds that people's attitudes follow their behaviour because they do not wish to appear inconsistent to others. In order to make a good impression, people may even feign attitudes they do not hold. People who are high in self-monitoring are especially inclined to change their own behaviour in response to social cues. When people are prevented from feigning attitudes with a bogus pipeline, their attitudes change less to meet their behaviour than when they are free to try to appear consistent.

Cognitive dissonance theory

This theory holds that people's attitudes follow their behaviour because they do not wish to be inconsistent. Festinger (1957) posited that we feel dissonance when we hold cognitions that are inconsistent, such as acting one way and feeling another. One important prediction of Festinger's theory was that if either behaviour or attitudes changed, the other would follow. However, Festinger showed that students who performed a boring task but were well-paid for it rated the task as boring, whereas students who performed the same task for very little reward rated it as much more pleasant. They had been given insufficient justification for their efforts, and therefore experience dissonance between their behaviour and their attitude, and changed their attitude accordingly.

Self-perception theory

This theory holds that when people are uncertain about their attitudes, they look to their own behaviour and make an inference. Daryl Bem (1972) proposed that much as we infer other people's attitudes from their behaviour, so we infer our own. This effect has been shown by experiments (e.g., Laird, 1974, 1984) in which participants are induced to smile or frown and then report on their mood. Smilers reported feeling happier than frowners. Self-perception theory offers an alternative explanation for the effects of insufficient justification in dissonance research. When people are given extrinsic rewards for performing some behaviour, they infer than the behaviour must be unpleasant, or they would perform it with only intrinsic motivation. This overjustification effect has been confirmed experimentally by many researchers. Dissonance theory and self-perception theory both hold that people's attitudes are determined by their behaviour. A major difference between the two is that only dissonance theory posits tension-reduction as the reason that people change their attitudes. Research has shown that dissonance does arouse tension (e.g., Cacioppo & Petty, 1986). Furthermore, when the tension produced by dissonance is reduced by having experiment participants drink alcohol, these participants do not then alter their attitudes to follow their behaviour (Steele, 1981). In cases where people are induced to act contrary to their attitudes, but where no great dissonance results (e.g., smiling or frowning and then reporting feeling happy or sad, respectively), self-perception is the theory of choice. It appears that dissonance theory explains why we change firmly-held attitudes so that they conform to any contradictory behaviour we perform. Self-perception theory seems better-suited to explaining how we form our attitudes in situations when we do not already have firmly-held attitudes.