4ACTING AS WE FEELWhen and How AttitudesGuide BehaviorRUSSELL H. FAZIODAVID R. ROSKOS-EWOLDSENIndiana UniversityLIniversity of AlabamaConsider each of the following statements. Do you believe the statement to be trueor false?1.2.3.4.5.College students who disapprove of cheating do not cheat on tests; it is onlythe students who view cheating as acceptable who do cheat.When segregation was still legal, hotel and restaurant owners with racialstereotypes toward Chinese people would not serve them food or allow themto stay at their establishments.How well people like their jobs is predictive of their job attendance. Peoplewho like their jobs are less likely to miss a day of work.During the 1970s, people who felt that the energy crisis was a significant prob-lem used less energy than those people who did not really believe that therewas a crisis.Regardless of whether an employer makes a snap judgment or deliberatesextensively about a hiring decision, if the employer has a negative attitudetoward working women, a femple candidate will not be hired.All of these common-sense statements assume that people’s attitudes influ-ence their actions and decisions. In fact, as we shall see in this chapter, none of71Chapter 4these five statements is correct. The basic finding of decades of research is thatsometimes people act in accordance with their attitudes, and other times, they actin ways that are quite inconsistent with their attitudes.In this chapter, we shall address three fundamental questions regarding theattitude-behavior relation (see Zanna & Fazio, 1982). (1) 1s there a relation? That is,do attitudes influence behavior? (2) When is such a relation to be expected? In otherwords, what variables determine the degree to which attitudes might influencebehavior? To the extent that attitudes do predict behavior, this question concernsthe identification of other factors that play a role in this relationship. Finally, (3)Elow do attitudes guide behavior? By what psychological processes do attitudesexert these influences? If we are to understand the relation between attitudes andbehavior, we need to develop models and theories of the psychological processesthat link attitudes to behavior.Is There a Relation Between Attitudes and Behavior?For a number of decades now, the field of social psychology has had reason toquestion the intuitively reasonable assumption that people behave consistentlywith their attitudes. During the early 1930s, LaPiere (1934) conducted what hasbecome probably the most widely cited study of the attitude-behavior relation.While traveling across the western United States in the company of a Chinese cou-ple, LaPiere stopped at over 200 hotels and restaurants. The Chinese couple wasrefused service at only one establishment. Some six months later, LaPiere wrote toeach of the establishments, asking if they served Chinese guests. Surprisingly, gz~.of those who responded indicated that they did not accommodate Chinese guests.Thus, there was a startling inconsistency between the attitude responses toLaPiere’s letter and the actual behavior toward the Chinese couple with whomLaPiere had traveled. In a very similar study concerning an African American per-son, instead of Chinese guests, Kutner, Wilkins, and Yarrow (1952) also observedmuch discrepancy between people’s reports of their attitudes and their actualbehavior.Although these findings seem to indicate a lack of correspondence betweenattitudes and behavior, the relevance of these classic studies to the issue of attitude-behavior consistency has been questioned. For example, the point has been raisedthat the person who waited on the Chinese guests in the LaPiere study or theAfrican American guest in the Kutner et al. study may not have been the same per-son who responded to the attitude question (Ajzen, Darroch, Fishbein, & Homik,1970; Dillehay 1973). In addition, it can be argued that the specific individuals whowere admitted to the establishments in these studies were not representative ofwhat came to the proprietor’s mind when asked in an abstract mailing aboutadmitting a Chinese or African American person (Lord, Lepper, & Mackie, 1984).That is, the proprietor may have imagined a slovenly, unappealing person whenresponding to the attitude question, in contrast to the pleasant appearance of thespecific individuals who were admitted.Acting As We Feel73However, these studies are by no means the only ones to challenge theassumption that individuals typically behave consistently with their attitudes. Forexample, Corey (1937) examined the relationship between students’ attitudestoward cheating and their actual cheating behavior. The students took a series oftrue-false examinations, which they self-scored at a later class meeting. Unbe-known to the students, however, the instructor had scored the exams during theinterim period. Thus, the difference between the scores that students assigned tothemselves and the scores assigned by the instructor served as the measure of stu-dents’ cheating behavior. The correlation between the students’ attitudes towardcheating and actual cheating was essentially zero. Attitudes toward cheating didnot in the least bit predict the actual behavior. Instead, cheating was related to testperformance; the more poorly the student had done on the exam, the more likelythe student was to cheat in scoring the exam.Corey’s findings are not unusual. Indeed, in a highly influential paper, Wicker(1969) reviewed 31 investigations of the attitude-behavior relation and concludedthat,Taken as a whole, these studies suggest that it is considerably more likely that attitudeswill be unrelated or only slightly related to overt behaviors than that attitudes will beclosely related to actions . . . .Correlation coejjlcients relating the two kinds of responsesare rarely above ,30, and often are near zero. (p. 65)Wicker’s review, along with others (e.g., Deutscher, 1973), led to considerable skep-ticism—sufficiently so that some suggested that “it maybe desirable to abandonthe attitude concept” (Wicker, 1971, p. 29).Nonetheless, this skepticism does not appear to have been fully warranted.Although it cannot be denied that a large number of studies suggest that attitudesdo not influence behavior, sometimes attitudes do predict behavior. For example,studies of voting behavior consistently have indicated a substantial relationbetween preelection attitudes and voting. Basically, people vote for the