No abstract

Declarations and actions do not always overlap, and thus, predicting future behavior solely on the basis of self-reported measures seems to be ineffective. The authors propose a confidence index (CI): a measure based on Fazio's attitude accessibility model. CI integrates explicit and implicit perspectives and captures how long a person hesitates when stating an opinion. The more certain someone is the stronger the attitude-behavior link is likely to be. A study was conducted to uncover differences in attitudes between average- and top-performing sales agents from the automotive industry. The results for declarative data did not show any significant differences; however, the CI results yielded interesting significant differences between groups. Random decision forests analyses confirmed that merging explicit and implicit measures increases predictive power of the tool. The study provided actionable insights on how to improve sales team performance, which were then implemented and eventually validated by sales results.

Verbal mimicry research claims that repeating words spoken by another makes people more eager to comply with requests made by the mimicker (e.g., fulfilling a request to donate to charity). Instead, another mechanism might explain these results. Recent studies found that when a request was preceded by engaging a participant in dialogue (defined as a short conversation), the participant was more willing to fulfill the request. Thus, verbal mimicry might be perceived in the same way as dialogue. If this is the case, a theoretical confound would be revealed. To test whether the mechanisms are different of the same, two field studies were conducted using a 2 (dialogue: yes/ no) × 2 (mimicry: yes/no) design. The study results revealed two main effects and no interaction effects, which means that verbal mimicry and dialogue are two distinct mechanisms. Interestingly, additive effects for these mechanisms were found.