Attitude and Action: A Field Experiment Joined to a General Population Survey

Walking the Talk? What Employers Say Versus What They Do

“…Indeed, the three "classic" studies that found very weak associations between expressed behavioral intentions and behaviors all were studies of discrimination in social situations (Kutner et al 1952;LaPiere 1934;Saenger and Gilbert 1950). We believe it possible that survey responses may provide a much more effective proxy for behavior in other contexts, such as those that involve voting (Traugott and Katosh 1979), signing of a petition (Brannon et al 1973), or patterns of consumer behavior (Day et al 1991), in which the link between behavioral intentions and actual behavior is less subject to contextual influences apart from the respondent's attitude or intention.…”

Public Beliefs About the Beliefs of the Public

“…The 1969 study included a direct measure of consistency between interview response and no'ninterview racial behavior, as described more fully in Brannon, et al (1973). It involved a post-survey request to respondents to sign and allow to be published in newspapers over their signatures a petition in support of the position on the open housing issue they had verbalized in the earlier interview.…”

Antidemocratic Beliefs: A Survey and Some Explanations

“…Were the implications .of the principles made apparent and the process of deduction presented and practiced, tolerance would likely increase. A number of studies indicate that the prediction of behavior from attitudes is greatly improved when the attitude object is measured at the same level of specificity in both cases (Brannon et al, 1973;Fishbein, 1967;Liska, 1974). I t is probably also true that prediction is improved when attitudes and behaviors are presented and taught at the same level of specificity.…”

“…One explanation suggested for the generally poor predictive utility of attitudes is that characteristics of the situation in which a behavior occurs interact with attitude in determining behavior (Campbell, 1963;Wicker, 1969Wicker, , 1971. Indeed, it has been found that the presence of others (Warner & DeFleur, 1969), social norms and role requirements (Fendrich, 1967), specificity of the attitude object (Wicker, 1969;Brannon, Cyphers, Hesse, Hesselbart, Keane, Schuman, Viccaro, & Wright, 1973), and the perceived consequences of the behavior all affect the relationship between attitude and behavior. These factors would be expected to mediate the relationship between civil liberties attitudes and behaviors as well.…”