The Influence of Attitudes on Behavior

Abstract

Work on general attitudes has drawn attention to the roles of attitude accessibility, controlled versus automatic information processing, and biases in information processing produced by automatically activated general attitudes towards objects. However, early failures to demonstrate strong attitude-behavior relations were shown to be attributable to incompatibility in the level of generality at which these variables were assessed. General attitudes toward policies, people, institutions, and events correlate well with general behavioral patterns but not with specific behaviors. Predicting specific actions requires a measure of attitude toward the behavior itself, as in the reasoned action approach, which takes specific behavior as its starting point and identifies intentions, attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioral control as important determinants. In addition to discussing those topics, this chapter reviews major meta-analyses of the attitude-behavior relation.