Relationships among attitudes and subjective norms: Testing the theory of reasoned action across cultures

TLDR

The study examines how attitudes toward a behavior relate to subjective norms within the Theory of Reasoned Action. The authors distinguish social from personal attitudes toward a behavior to test why attitudes and subjective norms are moderately to highly correlated. Only social attitudes are significantly related to subjective norms, and this overlap occurs when attitudes are social; although collectivistic cultures score higher on both, these higher scores do not predict behavioral intention, indicating that cross‑cultural differences in absolute strengths do not affect the relative influence of attitudes and norms on intention.

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between attitudes toward a behavior and subjective norms in the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA). Unique to this research, attitudes toward a behavior are divided into social and personal attitudes in order to test an explanation for the moderate to high correlation between attitudes and subjective norms reported in previous research. As expected, only social attitudes toward a behavior are significantly related to subjective norms. The finding indicates that the overlap between attitudes and subjective norms in TRA research occurs when the attitudes studied are social in nature. Additionally, members of a collectivistic culture tend to score higher on subjective norms and social attitudes, but the high score on subjective norms and social attitudes does not necessarily contribute to predicting behavioral intention. It is suggested that cross‐cultural differences on the absolute strengths of attitudes and subjective norms may not translate to the differences in the relative weights of the two components in predicting behavioral intention.