untitled
Do attitudes determine
ehaviour?
Are we all hypocrites?
When do attitudes predict behaviour?
Does behaviour determine
attitudes?
Role playing
Saying becomes believing
The foot-in-the-door phenomenon
Evil acts and attitudes
Good acts and attitudes
Social movements
Why do actions affect
attitudes?
Self-presentation: Impression
management
Self-justification: Cognitive dissonance
Self-perception
Comparing the theories
Each year throughout the industrialized world, the tobaccoindustry kills some 2 million of its best customers (Peto et al.,
1992). Given present trends, estimates a 1994 World Health Or-
ganization report, half a billion people alive today will be killed by
tobacco. Although quick assisted suicide may be illegal, slow-
motion suicide assisted by the tobacco industry is not.
People wonder: With the tobacco industry responsible for fatal-
ities equal to 14 loaded and crashed jumbo jets a day (not including
those in the expanding but hard to count developing world mar-
ket), how do tobacco company executives live with themselves? At
one of the world’s two largest tobacco advertisers, upper-level
executives—mostly intelligent, family-oriented, community-
minded people—resent being called “mass murderers.” They were
less than pleased when one government official (Koop, 1997) called
them “a sleazy bunch of people who misled us, deceived us and
lied to us for three decades.” Moreover, they defend smokers’ right
to choose. “Is it an addiction issue?” asks one vice-president.
“I don’t believe it. People do all sorts of things to express their indi-
viduality and to protest against society. And smoking is one of
them, and not the worst” (Rosenblatt, 1994).
Social psychologists wonder: Do such statements reflect pri-
vately held attitudes? If this executive really thinks smoking is a
comparatively healthy expression of individuality, how are such
attitudes internalized? Or do his statements reflect social pressure
to say things he doesn’t believe?
When people question someone’s attitude, they refer to beliefs
and feelings related to a person or event and the resulting behaviour.
Taken together, favourable or unfavourable evaluative reactions—
whether exhibited in beliefs, feelings, or inclinations to act—define a
C H A P T E R 4
Behaviou
and
Attitudes
myers52027_ch04_4P.qxd 2/27/06 3:52 PM Page 109
110 part one Social thinking
person’s attitude toward something
(Olson & Zanna, XXXXXXXXXXAttitudes
are an efficient way to size up the
world. When we have to respond
quickly to something, how we feel
about it can guide how we react
(Bassili & Roy, 1998; Breckler
& Wiggins, 1989; Sanbonmatsu
& Fazio, XXXXXXXXXXFor example, a per-
son who believes a particular ethnic
group is lazy and aggressive may
feel dislike for such people and
therefore intend to act in a discrimi-
natory manner. When assessing atti-
tudes, we tap one of these three
dimensions. You can remembe
them as the ABCs of attitudes: affect
(feelings), behaviour (intention),
and cognition (thoughts).
The study of attitudes is close to
the heart of social psychology and historically was one of its first concerns.
Researchers wondered: How much do our attitudes affect our actions?
Do attitudes determine behaviour?
To what extent, and under what conditions, do attitudes drive our outward
actions? Why were social psychologists at first surprised by a seemingly small
connection between attitudes and actions?
What is the relationship between what we are (on the inside) and what we do
(on the outside)? Philosophers, theologians, and educators have long specu-
lated about the connection between thought and action, character and conduct,
private word and public deed. The prevailing assumption, which underlies
most teaching, counselling, and child rearing, has been that our private beliefs
and feelings determine our public behaviour. So if we want to alter the way
people act, we need to change their hearts and minds.
Are we all hypocrites?
In the beginning, social psychologists agreed: To know people’s attitudes is to
predict their actions. But in 1964, Leon Festinger—judged by some to have been
social psychology’s most important contributor (Gerard, 1994)—concluded the
evidence did not show that changing attitudes changes behaviour. Festinge
elieved the attitude–behaviour relation works the other way around, with ou
ehaviour as the horse and our attitudes as the cart. As Robert Abelson
(1972) put it, we are “very well trained and very good at finding reasons fo
what we do, but not very good at doing what we find reasons for.”
A further blow to the supposed power of attitudes came in 1969, when social
psychologist Allan Wicker reviewed several dozen research studies covering a
wide variety of people, attitudes, and behaviours, and offered a shocking
Attitudes and actions:
Many sports events, which
glorify health and physical
prowess, are sponsored by
manufacturers of products
like cigarettes, which are
dangerous to health.
attitude
a favourable o
unfavourable
evaluative reaction
toward something o
someone, exhibited in
one’s beliefs, feelings,
or intended behaviou
“The ancestor of
every action is a
thought.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Essays, First Series, 1841
myers52027_ch04_4P.qxd 2/27/06 3:52 PM Page 110
Behaviour and attitudes chapter 4 111
conclusion: People’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted their varying behav-
iours. Student attitudes toward cheating bore little relation to the likelihood of
their actually cheating. Attitudes toward the church were only modestly linked
with church attendance on any given Sunday. Self-described racial attitudes
provided little clue to behaviours in actual situations.
An example of the disjuncture between attitudes and actions is what Daniel
Batson and his colleagues (1997, 1999) call “moral hypocrisy” (appearing moral
without being so). Their studies presented their university with an appealing
task (where the participant could earn raffle tickets toward a $30 prize) and a
dull task with no positive consequences. The students had to assign themselves
to one and a supposed second participant to the other. Only 1 in 20 believed
that assigning the positive task to themselves was the most moral thing to
do, yet 80 percent did so. In follow-up experiments on moral hypocrisy,
participants were given coins they could flip privately if they wished. Even if
they chose to flip, 90 percent assigned themselves to the positive task! Was this
ecause they could specify the consequences of heads and tails after the coin
toss? In yet another experiment, Batson put a sticker on each side of the
coin, indicating what the flip outcome would signify. Still, 24 of 28 people who
made the toss assigned themselves to the positive task. When morality and
greed were put on a collision course, greed won.
If people don’t play the same game that they talk, it’s little wonder that
attempts to change behaviour by changing attitudes often fail. Warnings about
the dangers of smoking only minimally affect those who already smoke.
Increasing public awareness of the desensitizing and
utalizing effects of a
prolonged diet of television violence has stimulated many people to voice a
desire for less violent programming—yet they still watch media murder as
much as ever. Appeals for safe driving have had far less effect on accident rates
than have lower speed limits, divided highways, and drunk driving penalties
(Etzioni, 1972).
THE STORY Behind the Research
I began studying attitudes while I was a gradu-
ate student working with Mark Zanna at the
University of Waterloo. Initially, I was most
interested in the consequences of attitudes,
ather than attitude formation or change. Fo
example, Mark and I investigated the
effects of attitudes on behaviour (attitude–
ehaviour consistency) and memory (selective
learning). I then became interested in self-
perception processes—the tendency for people
to make inferences about their attitudes from
their behaviours. More recently, my research
has turned to issues concerning the nature and
origins of attitudes, such as the functions of
attitudes, the effects of attitude accessibility,
the relation between attitudes and values, and
the heritability of attitudes. I have been
extremely fortunate to work with many
outstanding graduate students at the Univer-
sity of Western Ontario,
including Carolyn Hafer,
Douglas Hazelwood,
Gregory Maio, and Neal
Roese, whose thinking
has helped to shape my
work.
James T. Olson
University of Western
Ontario
myers52027_ch04_4P.qxd 2/27/06 3:52 PM Page 111
While Wicker and others were describing the weakness of attitudes, some
personality psychologists found personality traits equally ineffective in pre-
dicting behaviour (Mischel, XXXXXXXXXXIf we want to know how helpful people are
going to be, we usually won’t learn much by giving them tests of self-esteem,
anxiety, or defensiveness. In a situation with clear-cut demands, we are bette
off knowing how most people react. Likewise, many critics of psychotherapy
egan to argue that talking therapies, such as psychoanalysis, seldom “cure”
problems. Instead of analyzing personality defects, the critics said, the way to
change an attitude was to change the problem behaviour.
All in all, the developing picture of what controls behaviour emphasized
external social influences and played down internal factors, such as attitudes
and personality. The emerging image was of little billiard balls that have differ-
ent stripes and colours, to be sure, but are all buffeted by outside forces. In short,
the original thesis that attitudes determine actions was countered during the
1960s by the antithesis that attitudes determine virtually nothing.
Thesis. Antithesis. Is there a synthesis? The surprising finding that what peo-
ple say often differs from what they do sent social psychologists scu
ying to find
out why. Surely, we reasoned, convictions and feelings must sometimes make a
difference.
Indeed. In fact, what we are about to explain now seems so obvious that we
wonder why most social psychologists (ourselves included) were not thinking
this way before the early 1970s. We must remind ourselves that truth neve
seems obvious until it is known.
When do attitudes predict behaviour?
Our behaviour and our expressed attitudes differ because both are subject to
other influences. One social psychologist counted 40 separate factors that com-
plicate their relationship (Triandis, 1982; see also Kraus, XXXXXXXXXXIf we could just
neutralize the other influences on behaviour—make all other things equal—
might attitudes accurately predict behaviours?
Minimizing social influences on expressed attitudes
Unlike a physician measuring heart rate, social psychologists never get a
direct reading on attitudes. Rather, we measure expressed attitudes. Like othe
ehaviours, expressions are subject to outside influences. This was vividly
demonstrated when politicians once overwhelmingly passed a salary increase
for themselves in an off-the-record vote, then moments later overwhelmingly
defeated the same bill on a roll-call vote. Fear of criticism had distorted the true
sentiment on the roll-call vote. We sometimes say what we think others want to
hear.
Today’s social psychologists have some clever means at their disposal fo
subtly assessing attitudes. One is to measure facial muscle responses to state-
ments (Cacioppo & Petty, XXXXXXXXXXDo the facial muscles reveal a microsmile or a
microfrown? Another, the “implicit association test,” uses reaction times to
measure how quickly people associate concepts (Greenwald et al., 2002, 2003).
One can, for example, measure implicit racial attitudes by assessing whethe
people take