Attitudes and Behavior

Abstract

Attitudes have generated interest in the social sciences because they have been presumed to exert a strong influence on behaviors. This article reviews the evolution of perspectives on the attitude-behavior link. It begins with early perspectives that assumed a strong attitude-behavior association and then discusses research and perspectives challenging this assumption. Next, various explanations for why attitudes sometimes fail to predict behaviors are reviewed. The article concludes with a discussion of contemporary themes in attitude-behavior consistency research such as the proposition that the processes by which attitudes influence behavior differs as a function of whether behaviors are deliberative versus spontaneous.

Intentions

“…Sheeran (2002) computed a sample‐weighted average intention–behavior correlation of 0.53 across several intentions–behavior meta‐analyses and characterized the effect size for this relationship as large. As noted earlier, research has also shown that intentions are more strongly correlated with behavior than are attitudes (Guyer & Fabrigar, 2015).…”

“…The reasoned action approach encompasses the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) and the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991), and was initially developed to better articulate the relationship between attitudes and behaviors (Guyer & Fabrigar, 2015). In the late 1960s, accumulating research suggested that attitudes do not predict behaviors well in many circumstances (Wicker, 1969).…”

“…Other methodological moderators have to do with factors linking how intentions and behavior are measured. For example, the match between the specificity or compatibility of the intentions and the behavior can influence the strength of the relationship, as can the length of time between when the measures are taken (Ajzen et al., 2019; Guyer & Fabrigar, 2015). For example, similar to the earlier discussion on attitudes, general intentions measures (e.g., intentions to vote) would not be good predictors of a more specific behavior (e.g., intentions to vote for a particular candidate).…”

Implicit and explicit attitudes towards disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs as possible target for improving medication adherence

“…However, the concept of predicting behaviour by implicit measures was recently challenged by studies demonstrating that correlations between implicit measures and measures of behaviour are often small to medium[48–50]. Person-, context-, and behaviour-specific moderators might be responsible for these contradictory findings [25,48,49]. For instance, medication-taking behaviour can be seen as a more habitual, recurrent behaviour that might initially originate in conscious thought processes (“I should not forget my medication”), whereas some of the other examined behaviours can be argued to be less habitual and frequent (e.g., voting) and less rooted in conscious thought (e.g., brand preferences).…”

“…The validity of the SC-IATs used in this study might be questioned since the target population might have a limited hand function, which might provide insufficient contrast between the experimental rounds in the SC-IATs. Also, it is unclear if the words and pictures used as stimuli in the SC-IATs are optimally related to patient’s medication use [49]. However, pictures were created based on pharmacy records in participating centres (i.e.…”