Direct Experience

Fazio & Zanna (1981)

• Attitudes are learned:

• Through experience
• Encountered the problem in “real life”
• Haven’t been helped or harmed
• Through indirect means
• Listening to parents, etc.
• From books, television, etc.
• How might these types of attitudes differ?
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Direct Experience
Fazio & Zanna (1981)

• Attitudes from experience

• More Clearly Defined
• Held with Greater Certainty
• More Stable
• More Resilient
• Therefore?
• More likely to predict behaviour 2
 Social Psychology: Attitudes
and Persuasion

Attitudes & Behaviour

Do Attitudes Predict Behaviour?

3
Heritability

• Do we inherit our attitudes?

• Identical twins raised apart show that they have similar attitudes
despite growing up in different environments.
• Apparently attitudes are influenced by genetics

4
Genetic Factors

• While genes do not determine attitudes, genetic influence can

have an impact on attitudes:
• Sensory structures
• Body chemistry
• Intelligence
• Temperament and activity level
• Conditionability

5
Attitudes toward Chinese LaPiere(1934)

• In 1934, prejudice towards Chinese people was common

• Took road trip with a Chinese couple
• Stopped at 251 hotels and restaurants (over 2 years)
• Recorded how they were treated (pos or neg)

6
Attitudes toward Chinese LaPiere(1934)

• After returning, wrote to the owners and asked how they would
treat a Chinese couple
• What did the people say?
• of respondents said that they would not serve a
Chinese couple.
• attitude

7
Attitudes toward Chinese LaPiere(1934)

• BUT What did people do? On the road trip:

• The couple was only refused service once
• behaviour
• Inconsistency --
• Negative attitudes
• Positive behaviours

8
Cheating Corey(1937)

• Measured attitudes towards cheating

• Students take a test and grade it themselves
• (The students did not know that Corey had already pre-
graded the tests)

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Cheating Corey(1937)

• By comparing the tests he had graded with the tests the

students graded, he could tell which students had cheated.
• There was correlation between attitude and behaviour.

10
A Critical Review
Wicker(1969, 1971)

• Reviewed all the studies on attitude-behaviour consistency and

concluded that the relationship between attitudes and
behaviour was
• Suggested that psychologists should abandon the concept of an
“attitude”.
• Why was Wicker so negative?

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Why was Wicker so negative?

• During the late 60s and early 70s, social psychology was in a
state of crisis
• There was a sense of pessimism: social psychology had been
based on laboratory experiments (and deception), so maybe
it had nothing to do with the real world (ecological validity)

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Psychometrics

• Social psychologists did not give up on the idea of attitude-

behaviour consistency
• Just been going about it the wrong way
• They developed a number of ideas to better understand the
relationship between attitudes and behaviour

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Psychometric Principle

• Any single measure of behaviour or psychological concept

(single-act criterion) is not reliable
• There is usually a lot of error associated with each single
measure – tone of wording, choice of words…etc.

14
SOLUTION?

• Use multiple measures (multiple-act criteria) and add them all

together (aggregate)
• When we measure an attitude/behaviour, we should not
measure it using one test/action (e.g. Corey’s study)
• What we need to do is measure attitudes/behaviours using
multiple tests/actions

15
Aggregation Fishbein &
Ajzen (1974)

• Used multiple measures to determine if religious attitudes were

consistent with religious behaviours
• To measure religious behaviour, the experimenters came up
with 100 different religious behaviours (donate money to
church, pray before or after meals)
• and asked the participants if they engaged in them

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Aggregation Fishbein &
Ajzen (1974)

• Correlations of Attitude to Specific behaviour:

• For each of the 100 (single act) it was Low (r = 0.12 – 0.14).
• ~1% explained (.12 * .12)
• Aggregated (multiple-act) into one score there was a
substantial increase in correlation (r = 0.6-0.7)
• ~42% explained

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18
General vs. Specific Attitudes

• Multiple act criteria help establishes high levels of attitude-

behaviour consistency
• Attitudes are general and are measured in general terms
(positive or negative).
• Actions like ‘praying before meals’ are very specific.
• Should measure behaviour by looking at the general trend
among many behaviours

19
Generality

• If interested in specific behaviours, need to measure specific

attitudes
• Interested in whether someone will vote?
• Need to ask: “Will you vote?”
• Better: “Will you vote in the next election?”
• Even better: “How do you intend to vote?”
• Not: “How political are you?”

20
Different Questions for Different
behaviours
• General → Aggregate (across situations)
• Specific → Specific (Particular time and place)

21
Attitude Strength

• Stronger attitudes will predict attitudes/behaviour better than

weaker attitudes
• More
• More
• More
• What predictions would you make for ambivalent attitudes?

22
Moderators of the Relation between
Attitudes and Behaviour
• Behaviour is carried out by an individual in a particular situation
• There are two types of factors that can moderate the relation
between attitudes and behaviour:
• the (personality factors) and
• the (situational factors)

23
Personality Factors

• Basically, people have

• To test, looked at consistency of behaviour, within particular

situations
• Found that people will act in similar ways in the same
situations, but not necessarily in different situations

24
Personality Factors

• Reconciles the paradoxical findings on the invariance of

personality and the variability of behaviour across situations.

25
Personality Factors

• The theory accounts for individual differences in predictable

patterns of variability across situations
• if A then she X, but if B then she Y
• Overall average levels of behaviour, as essential expressions
or behavioural signatures of the same underlying personality
system.

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Need For Cognition

• Do people have a stable propensity to want to process

information systematically or heuristically?
• In the Need for Cognition Scale, participants indicate whether
they agree or disagree with certain statements

27
Need For Cognition

• Sample items from the scale:

• I really enjoy the task of coming up with new solutions.
• I set goals that require a lot of mental effort.
• Learning new techniques is not enjoyable.

28
Self-Monitoring
M. Snyder(1974)

• A personality variable that causes you to observe others around

you for cues to behave
• May influence behaviour (or the association between
attitudes/personality and behaviour).

29
Self-Monitoring
M. Snyder(1974)

• People who are high in self-monitoring will most likely behave

because they behave according to the
situation
• People who are low in self-monitoring draw on feelings and
attitudes when behaving
• Their behaviour is normally much more

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What about the situation?

• Attitudes toward Chinese (LaPiere, 1934)

• Pleasant couple
• Escorted by an educated White Professor
• Abstract couple vs. actual people

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Situational Factors

• Situational factors can influence whether an attitude is activated

• Typically, it is assumed that attitudes have a stronger influence
on behaviour when an attitude is activated in a situation

32
Situational Factors

• Think about the role of situational norms

• What are people expected to do in different situations?
• Different roles

33
Thurstone

• “The essential feature of attitude is a preparation or readiness

for response…not behaviour, but the precondition of
behaviour.”

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Theory of Reasoned Action
(Fishbein & Azjen)

• Premised on the belief that the immediate predictor of

Behaviour is a Behavioural Intention.
• So what predicts Behavioural Intention?

35
Behavioural Intention

• Attitudes
• Beliefs ( that come to mind) and
• Evaluations (how is that belief)
• Social Norms
• Normative Beliefs (what you think important others
)
• Motivation to Comply ( )

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Behaviour: Getting Drunk at a Party

• Attitude – includes salient beliefs (what thoughts come to mind).

• Belief (R)– if you get drunk, what is the probability of your
salient beliefs coming true (expectancy)? (range from +3 to –
3)
• Evaluation (e)– how good or bad salient belief is to you:
(range from +3 to –3)

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Attitude Toward Behaviour
Belief (R) Evaluation (e) (R)(e)
+2 +3 +6
Consequences
+3 +2 +6
• Have Fun
+1 -3 -3
• Relax
+9
• Get a hangover
ATTITUDE = Σ(R)(e)

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Subjective Norms About Behaviour
(NB) (MC) (NB)(MC)
Important Referents -2 +3 -6
My partner -1 +2 -2
My close friends +3 +1 +3
My new friends -3 +1 -3
People in the bar -8
NB – normative beliefs (what are the referents’ opinions on
getting drunk?)
MC – motivation to comply (how important is their approval
to you?)
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SUBJECTIVE NORMS = Σ(NB)(MC)
Attitude + Subjective Norms =
Intention
• ATTITUDE + SUBJECTIVE NORMS = INTENTION
• So from before, +9 + (-8) = 1

• On a hypothetical scale, they have an intention of 1 to do the

Behaviour.

• Will they do it?

40
The Complete Model

41
Behavioural Intentions

• McArdle (1972)
• Asked alcoholics if they intended to sign-up for an alcohol
treatment program.
• The correlation between intending to sign up and actually
signing up

42
Behavioural Intentions
Davidson & Jaccard (1979)

• Measured women’s attitudes and subjective norms

(intention) on having a baby within the next 2 years.
• The correlation between those women who had a baby
within the next 2 years and those who intended to have a
baby within the next 2 years was
• When intention was correlated with attempted conception,
the correlation coefficient rose to

43
Behavioural Intentions

• HOWEVER,
• What is more important?
• Attitudes or Subjective Norms?

44
Priming the importance of Attitudes
versus Social Norms
• Participants were asked to think for 2 minutes about:
• things that make them different from friends and families
OR
• things that they have in common with friends and families

45
Attitudes versus Social Norms

• Afterwards participants rated their Attitudes, Social Norms, and

Behavioural Intentions towards using condoms.

46
Attitudes versus Social Norms

• After priming independence, attitudes were a stronger predictor

of Behavioural intentions ( ) than social norms (r = ).
• After priming interdependence (relatedness), social norms were
a stronger predictor of Behavioural intentions ( ) than
attitudes ( ).

47
Conclusion

• The Theory of Reasoned Actions shows that attitudes are only

one of several factors that influence Behaviour.
• Social norms influence Behaviour independently of attitudes.
• The relative influence of attitudes and social norms is influenced
by situational and personality factors and may vary across
attitude objects.

48
Behaviour predicting Behaviour?
Bentler & Speckart (1979)

• Modified the model to include Behaviour.

• Previous Behaviour could influence future Behaviour as well
as intention.
• The effect of habit, conditioned releasers or learned
predispositions to respond.

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Habit in the Model
New
New
New

50
Within Person Factors

• Factors within a person can also moderate the relation between

attitudes and Behaviour
• One factor is attitudinal ambivalence

51
Attitudinal Ambivalence

• People with ambivalent attitudes are likely to act in

an attitude-consistent manner than people with an
unambiguous attitude.

52
Attitudinal Ambivalence

• Recognizing the positive and negative aspects of an attitude

object
• Can moderate the relation between attitude and behaviour.

53
Attitudinal Ambivalence

• High ambivalence: Behaviour can be influenced by the positive

or the negative aspects (inconsistent)
• Low ambivalence: Only positive or negative aspects are
activated (consistent)
• Consistent attitudes have a stronger effect on Behaviour than
ambivalent attitudes.

54
Theory of Planned Behaviour
Ajzen(1985)
• Modification of Theory of Reasoned Action
• Added one component...
• Perceived Behavioural control
• One needs to believe that he or she can control his or her
Behaviour in an attitude congruent way.
• How easy or hard will it be to perform the Behaviour?

55
 Theory of Planned Behaviour
Ajzen(1985)
Background
Factors Attitude
_______________ Behavioural
Toward
Individual Beliefs
Personality
Behaviour
Mood, emotion

Behaviour
Intelligence
Values, stereotypes
General attitudes Normative Subjective
Intention
Experience Beliefs Norm

Social
Education
Age, gender
Income
Perceived Actual
Religion Control
Race Behavioural Behavioural
Beliefs
Culture Control Control

Information NEW!
Knowledge
Media
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Situational Manipulation
Inducing Self-Awareness
• Self-awareness: A state of conscious control of one’s actions
(can be manipulated by situational factors such as mirrors,
cameras)

57
Situational Manipulation
Inducing Self-Awareness
• Halloween candy (Diener et al., 1986)
• Children “steal” less candy when they are asked their names
than when they remain anonymous.
• Evaluations of erotic stimuli (Gibbons, 1978)
• Attitudes towards pornography influence evaluations of
erotic material when facing a mirror but not when no mirror
is present

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Criticism

• The Theory of Planned Behaviour uses attitudes towards

Behaviours to predict Behaviour, whereas the original problem
was to link attitudes towards objects to Behaviours.
• Assumes Conscious Control

59