BEHAVIOR

AND
ATTITUDES
This chapter answer the following questions:

• How well do our attitudes predict our behavior?

• When does our behavior affect our attitudes?
• Why does our behavior affect our attitudes?
“The ancestor of every action is a thought.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Essays, First Series, 1841
• To know people’s attitudes is to predict their actions.
• In social psychology, attitudes are defined as beliefs and feelings related to
a person or an event (Eagly & Chaiken, 2005). Thus, a person may have a
negative attitude toward coffee, a neutral attitude toward the French, and a
positive attitude toward the next-door neighbor.
• For example, a person who believes a particular ethnic group is lazy and
aggressive may feel dislike for such people and therefore intend to act in a
discriminatory manner. You can remember these three dimensions as the
ABCs of attitudes: Affect (feelings), Behavior tendency, and Cognition
(thoughts)
HOW WELL DO OUR ATTITUDES
PREDICT OUR BEHAVIOR?
• State the extent to which, and under what
conditions, our inner attitudes drive our outward
actions.
• Ex. Attitudes toward the church were only
modestly linked with weekly worship attendance.
• The disjuncture between attitudes and actions is
called “moral hypocrisy” (appearing moral while
avoiding the costs of being so).
If people don’t walk the same line that they talk, it’s little wonder that
attempts to change behavior by changing attitudes often fail.

• Warnings about the dangers of smoking affect only minimally

those who already smoke.
• Sex education programs have often influenced attitudes toward
abstinence and condom use without affecting long-term abstinence
and condom use behaviors.
When Attitudes Predict Behavior
• Our attitudes do predict our behavior when these other influences on
what we say and do are minimal, when the attitude is specific to the
behavior, and when the attitude is potent.
WHEN SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON WHAT
WE SAY ARE MINIMAL
• Unlike a doctor measuring heart rate, social psychologists never get a
direct reading on attitudes. Rather, we measure expressed attitudes.
Like other behaviors, expressions are subject to outside influences.
• Today’s social psychologists have some clever means at their disposal
for minimizing social influences on people’s attitude reports. Some of
these are measures of implicit (unconscious) attitudes—our often-
unacknowledged inner beliefs that may or may not correspond to our
explicit (conscious) attitudes
• Implicit association test (IAT) - A computer-driven assessment of
implicit attitudes. The test uses reaction times to measure people’s
automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words.
Easier pairings (and faster responses) are taken to indicate stronger
unconscious associations.
 SAY ANY
WORDS THAT
COMES INTO
YOUR MIND
• Implicit biases are pervasive. For example, 80 percent of people
show more implicit dislike for the elderly compared with the young.
• People differ in implicit bias. Depending on their group
memberships, their conscious attitudes, and the bias in their immediate
environment, some people exhibit more implicit bias than others.
• People are often unaware of their implicit biases. Despite thinking
themselves unprejudiced, even researchers themselves show implicit
biases against some social groups
WHEN OTHER INFLUENCES ON
BEHAVIOR ARE MINIMAL
• It’s not only our inner attitudes that guide us but also the situation we
face.
Example: People’s general attitude toward religion poorly
predicts whether they will go to worship services during the coming
week (because attendance is also influenced by the weather, the
worship leader, how one is feeling, and so forth).
The findings define a principle of aggregation: The effects of an
attitude become more apparent when we look at a person’s aggregate
or average behavior.
WHEN ATTITUDES ARE SPECIFIC TO
THE BEHAVIOR

THE THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR

• “theory of planned behavior,” is knowing people’s intended behaviors
and their perceived self-efficacy and control.
• So far we have seen two conditions under which attitudes will predict
behavior:
(1) when we minimize other influences upon our attitude statements
and on our behavior, and
(2) when the attitude is specifically relevant to the observed behavior.
A third condition also exists: An attitude predicts behavior better when
the attitude is potent.
WHEN ATTITUDES ARE POTENT
• Much of our behavior is automatic. We act out familiar scripts without
reflecting on what we’re doing. We respond to people we meet in the
hall with an automatic “Hi.” We answer the restaurant cashier’s
question “How was your meal?” by saying, “Fine,” even if we found it
only so-so.
• Such mindlessness is adaptive. It frees our minds to work on other
things. For habitual behaviors—seat belt use, coffee consumption,
class attendance—conscious intentions are hardly activated
BRINGING ATTITUDES TO MIND
• If we were prompted to think about our attitudes before acting, would
we be truer to ourselves?
• ” Our attitudes become potent if we think about them.
• Make them self-aware
• Making people self-aware in this way promotes consistency between
words and deeds
FORGING STRONG ATTITUDES
THROUGH EXPERIENCE.
• The attitudes that best predict behavior are accessible (easily brought
to mind) as well as stable.
• And when attitudes are forged by experience, not just by hearsay, they
are more accessible, more enduring, and more likely to guide actions.
• In one study, university students all expressed negative attitudes about
their school’s response to a housing shortage. But given opportunities
to act—to sign a petition, solicit signatures, join a committee, or write
a letter—only those whose attitudes grew from direct experience acted
WHEN DOES OUR BEHAVIOR AFFECT
OUR ATTITUDES?
• behavior determines attitudes. It’s true that we sometimes stand up for
what we believe. But it’s also true that we come to believe in what we
stand up for.
• Sarah is hypnotized and told to take off her shoes when a book drops
on the floor. Fifteen minutes later a book drops, and Sarah quietly slips
out of her loafers. “Sarah,” asks the hypnotist, “why did you take off
your shoes?” “Well . . . my feet are hot and tired,” Sarah replies. “It
has been a long day.” The act produces the idea
Role Playing
• Role – a set of norms that defines how people in a given social
position ought to behave.
• Think of a time when you stepped into some new role—perhaps your
first days on a job or at college. That first week on campus, for
example, you may have been supersensitive to your new social
situation and tried valiantly to act mature and to suppress your high
school behavior. The role began to fit and comfortable.
• In one famous and controversial study,
college men volunteered to spend time in a
simulated prison constructed in Stanford’s
psychology department by Philip Zimbardo
(1971; Haney & Zimbardo, 1998, 2009).
Zimbardo wanted to find out: Is prison
brutality a product of evil prisoners and
malicious guards? Or do the institutional
roles of guard and prisoner embitter and
harden even compassionate people? Do the
people make the place violent? Or does the
place make the people violent?
• The deeper lesson of the role-playing studies is not that we are
powerless machines. Rather, it concerns how what is unreal (an
artificial role) can subtly morph into what is real. In a new career—as
teacher, soldier, or businessperson, for example—we enact a role that
shapes our attitudes. In one study, military training toughened German
males’ personalities.
Saying Becomes Believing
• People often adapt what they say to please their listeners. They are
quicker to tell people good news than bad, and they adjust their
message toward their listener’s views.
• Saying becomes believing: In expressing our thoughts to others, we
sometimes tailor our words to what we think the others will want to
hear, and then come to believe our own words
Evil and Moral Acts
• The attitudes-follow-behavior principle also works with immoral acts.
• Evil sometimes results from gradually escalating commitments.
• It is not as difficult to find a person who has never succumbed to a
given temptation as to find a person who has succumbed only once.
After telling a “white lie” and thinking, “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” the
person may go on to tell a bigger lie.
• Actions and attitudes feed each other, sometimes to the point of moral
numbness. The more one harms another and adjusts one’s attitudes, the
easier it becomes to do harm. Conscience is corroded.
Foot-in-the-door phenomenon
• After agreeing to help out with a project or an organization, we ended
more involved than we ever intended.
• Research on the foot-in-the-door phenomenon reveals that
committing a small act makes people more willing to do a larger one
later.
• Low ball technique – a tactic for getting people to agree something.
People who agree to an initial request will often simply comply when
the requester ups the ante. People who receive only the costly request
are less likely to comply with it.
Social Movements
• We have seen that a society’s laws and, therefore, its behavior can have a
strong influence on its racial attitudes. A danger lies in the possibility of
employing the same idea for political socialization on a mass scale.
• Germans during the 1930s, participation in Nazi rallies, displaying the
Nazi flag, and especially the public greeting “Heil Hitler” established a
profound inconsistency between behavior and belief.
• “the ‘German greeting’ was a powerful conditioning device. Having
once decided to intone it as an outward token of conformity, many
experienced . . . discomfort at the contradiction between their words and
their feelings
• The practice is not limited to totalitarian regimes. Political rituals—the
daily flag salute by schoolchildren, singing the national anthem—use
public conformity to build private patriotism

“You can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image;

you can use them to turn citizens into ‘public servants,’ prospects into
‘customers,’ prisoners into ‘collaborators.’”
—Robert Cialdini, Influence,
WHY DOES OUR BEHAVIOR AFFECT
OUR ATTITUDES?
• Self-presentation theory assumes that for strategic reasons
we express attitudes that make us appear consistent.
• Cognitive dissonance theory assumes that to reduce
discomfort, we justify our actions to ourselves.
• Self-perception theory assumes that our actions are self-
revealing: when uncertain about our feelings or beliefs, we
look to our behavior, much as anyone else would.
Self-Presentation: Impression
Management
• Who among us does not care what people think? People spend billions
on clothes, diets, cosmetics, and plastic surgery—all because of their
fretting over what others think. We see making a good impression as a
way to gain social and material rewards, to feel better about ourselves,
even to become more secure in our social identities.
• No one wants to look foolishly inconsistent. To avoid seeming so, we
express attitudes that match our actions. To appear consistent, we may
automatically pretend those attitudes (Tyler, 2012). Even a little
insincerity or hypocrisy can pay off in managing the impression we
are making—or so self-presentation theory suggests
Self-Justification: Cognitive
Dissonance
• One theory is that our attitudes change because we are motivated to
maintain consistency among our cognitions. That is the implication of
Leon Festinger’s (1957) famous cognitive dissonance theory.
• It assumes that we feel tension, or “dissonance”, when two of our
thoughts or beliefs (“cognitions”) are inconsistent. Festinger argued
that to reduce this unpleasant arousal, we often adjust our thinking.
• People whose confident beliefs are shaken will often respond by
seeking to persuade others. “When in doubt, shout!”
• Selective exposure - the tendency to seek information and media that
agree with one’s views and to avoid dissonant information
• Insufficient justification - reduction of dissonance by internally
justifying one’s behavior when external justification is “insufficient.”
Self-Perception
Self-perception theory
• The theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them
much as would someone observing us—by looking at our behavior
and the circumstances under which it occurs.
• Assumes that we make similar inferences when we observe our own
behavior. When our attitudes are weak or ambiguous, it’s similar to
someone observing us from the outside. Hearing myself talk informs
me of my attitudes; seeing my actions provides clues to how strong
my beliefs are. This is especially so when I can’t easily attribute my
behavior to external constraints. The acts we freely commit are self-
revealing.
• Facial feedback effect - The tendency of facial expressions to trigger
corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness.

Example: We’re feeling crabby, but then the phone rings or someone
comes to the door and elicits from us warm, polite behavior. “How’s
everything?” “Just fine, thanks. How are things with you?” “Oh, not
bad. . . .”
OVERJUSTIFICATION AND
INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS
• Over justification effect - the result of bribing people to do what they
already like doing; they may then see their actions as externally
controlled rather than intrinsically appealing.
The over justification effect occurs when someone offers an unnecessary reward
beforehand in an obvious effort to control behavior. What matters is what a
reward implies

• Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation When people do something they

enjoy, without reward or coercion, they attribute their behavior to their
love of the activity. External rewards undermine intrinsic motivation
by leading people to attribute their behavior to the incentive.
• Justifying our actions and decisions is therefore self-affirming; it
protects and supports our sense of integrity and self-worth. When
people engage in dissonance-generating actions, their thinking left
frontal lobes buzz with extra arousal (Harmon-Jones et al., 2008). This
is the grinding gears of belief change at work.
• Self-affirmation theory - A theory that (a) people often experience a
self-image threat after engaging in an undesirable behavior; and (b)
they can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self. Threaten
people’s self-concept in one domain, and they will compensate either
by refocusing or by doing good deeds in some other domain.
Changing Ourselves Through Action
To make anything a habit, do it. To not make it a habit, do not do it. To
unmake a habit, do something else in place of it.
—Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus

Attitudes-follow-behavior principle offers a powerful lesson for life: If

we want to change ourselves in some important way, it’s best not to wait
for insight or inspiration. Sometimes we need to act—to begin to write
that paper, to make those phone calls, to see that person—even if we
don’t feel like acting.