Ever wonder why people do what they do? This course—which includes more than $1,000 of video and reading materials—offers some answers based on the latest research from social psychology. Students taking the course for a Certificate will also receive free membership in Social Psychology Network (SocialPsychology.org). COURSE DESCRIPTION FROM PROFESSOR PLOUS: Each of us is dealt a different hand in life, but we all face similar questions when it comes to human behavior: What leads us to like one person and dislike another? How do conflicts and prejudices develop, and how can they be reduced? Can psychological research help protect the environment, and if so, how? This course offers a brief introduction to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being. Our focus will be on surprising, entertaining, and intriguing research findings that are easy to apply in daily life. The course will also draw from the websites of Social Psychology Network, the world's largest online community devoted to social psychology. I hope you'll join me for this course, have fun, and learn some useful information that enriches your life.
Lecture 2.3: Is the Attitude Bone Connected to the Behavior Bone?
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Из курса от партнера Wesleyan University
Social Psychology
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WEEK 2: The Psychology of Self-Presentation and Persuasion
This week's goals are to: (1) learn how people explain their behavior and the behavior of others; (2) explore the link between attitudes and behavior; (3) understand what cognitive dissonance is and why it matters; and (4) gain some practical tips from the science of persuasion and social influence.
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Scott PlousProfessor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching
Department of Psychology
In the last two lectures, we focused on how people interpret and explain
behavior. In this video, we're going to move to a
discussion of behavior itself, and the question of whether our attitudes
and our actions are closely related to each other.
Put briefly, the bottom line is that in many instances, there's far less
consistency between attitudes and behavior than one might suspect.
Most people imagine that the attitude bone's connected to the behavior bone,
but it just ain't so. For all sorts of good reasons, attitudes
are often quite different than behavior. For example, nearly all of us would say
that we care about the environment, and we all know that it's not good for the
environment if we use styrofoam or plastic products once and throw them
away, but at some point over the past year
that's exactly what many of us have done, according to answers that our class gave
in the Snapshot Quiz. In social psychology, that would be
considered an example of attitude-behavior inconsistency.
We hold certain attitudes about the environment, we hold certain attitudes
about plastic products, yet for a variety of reasons—some of which may be quite
legitimate—we behave at variance with our attitudes.
We behave differently than the attitudes that we hold.
Now, that's an example of plastic cups. What about cases in which we have very
powerful attitudes, very deeply-held convictions and core beliefs?
Would we still see a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior in that case?
To answer this question, I want to turn to two classic studies: one done in the
1930's, the other in the 1970's. The first study, published in 1934 by a
Stanford sociologist named Richard LaPiere, is the one that really put
attitude-behavior inconsistency on the map.
Beginning in 1930 and continuing for two full years, LaPiere traveled extensively
throughout the United States with a young Chinese couple.
They visited 184 restaurants and cafes, and 67 hotels, auto camps, and
tourist homes scattered across the country. Despite the intense anti-Chinese
prejudice common in those days, LaPiere observed racial discrimination
toward his traveling companions only once in 251 encounters.
In fact, LaPiere judged that his Chinese friends were received with
"more than ordinary consideration" on 72 occasions.
This was extraordinary given the anti-Chinese policies and practices that were
common in the United States back then. In fact, roughly 50 years earlier,
the U.S. Congress had passed a horrible Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese
workers from even entering the country, let alone eating in restaurants—
a law that wasn't repealed until 10 years after LaPiere's study.
Based on his experience during the road trip, LaPiere concluded that one would
never suspect a majority of Americans as being prejudiced against the Chinese—
that is, if you looked only at how people behaved toward the Chinese couple.
The prejudice most Americans had was very apparent in terms of attitudes,
as expressed later on a survey. This survey was sent to the proprietors
of each establishment six months after LaPiere and the couple had visited,
and it asked the proprietors, among other things, whether they would accept Chinese
people as guests in their establishment. With persistence, LaPiere was able to
get responses from 81 different restaurants and cafes, and 47 different
hotels, auto camps, and tourist homes. Of the 128 respondents, 118 (or 92%)
indicated that they would not accept Chinese guests.
Nine of the respondents (or 7%) said their decision would depend on the
circumstances, and one woman from an auto camp—bless her heart—
replied affirmatively, stating that she had hosted a Chinese couple
during the previous summer (that is, LaPiere's friends!).
Also, LaPiere wanted to make sure that these results weren't a function of the
Chinese couple having turned people off, so he surveyed 128 establishments that
were located in similar regions of the country but hadn't been visited
by the Chinese couple. The results were identical.
Again, he got 118 negative responses, 9 responses saying that it would depend,
and 1 affirmative response. So, it seems that people can hold
attitudes that have very little to do with actual behavior.
But of course, experimental methods were not very developed back in the 1930s.
So, even though this was considered a groundbreaking study at the time, it had
some serious limitations. For example, there weren't independent
ratings of discrimination— just LaPiere's personal opinion.
It's also possible that the Chinese couple would have encountered more
discrimination if Professor LaPiere hadn't been with them.
And the study used only one couple, so we don't know what would have
happened to other Chinese couples. Maybe LaPiere's friends were unusually
charming. This isn't to say that we should ignore
the results, or that the conclusions were wrong—it's simply to say that the
research methods were limited. So, let's turn to that second classic
study that I mentioned, which had better experimental controls, and which in some
ways was even more dramatic in its demonstration of how attitudes and
behavior can be different from each other.
This study was published in 1973 by John Darley and Dan Batson.
Darley and Batson were interested in the factors that lead people to help someone
who's in trouble. Their participants were 47 seminary
students (that is, students training to become
a priest or a minister), and in the experiment, students were
asked to give a speech either about jobs at which seminary students would be
effective (in other words, an open-ended topic that
doesn't really have a specific focus), or a speech on the Parable of the Good
Samaritan. For those of you who haven't heard of it before,
this is a Bible story about the importance of helping people in need.
In the story, a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho is robbed,
he's beaten savagely, left by the side of the road, and after a priest walks past him
without offering any help, a Samaritan comes to his aid.
In the study, an experimental assistant told students that their speeches would
be three to five minutes long and would be recorded by another assistant in a
different building. But as students went to that building,
they encountered a confederate who appeared to be in need.
In particular, Darley and Batson were interested to see whether helping was
related to two different independent variables
(that is, variables under the control of the experimenters):
first, whether students were about to discuss the Parable of the Good Samaritan
versus a topic unrelated to helping, and second, how much of a hurry the
students were in to get where they were going.
In the high-hurry condition, the experimental assistant looked at his
watch and said, "Oh, you're late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We'd
better get moving. The assistant should be waiting for you,
so you'd better hurry. It shouldn't take but just a minute."
And with that, the seminary student was whisked out the door.
In the intermediate-hurry condition, students were told, "The assistant is
ready for you, so please go right over." And in the low-hurry condition, students
were told, "It'll be a few minutes before they're ready for you, but you might as
well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn't be long."
Now, in order to get from one building to the other, each student had to pass
through an alley, and in that alley, Darley and Batson had placed
a poorly dressed man who sat slumped in a doorway, head down,
eyes closed, not moving. And by the way, the photos I'm showing
you come courtesy Professor Batson, who was kind enough to share them with our class.
Anyway, as the student went by, the man
coughed twice and groaned without lifting his head.
If the student stopped and asked if something was wrong, or the student
offered to help, the man would simply act startled and say something like this:
"Oh, thank you [COUGH]… but no, it's alright. I've got this respiratory condition [COUGH] and the
doctor's given me these pills to take, and I just took one. If I just sit and rest
for a few minutes, I'll be okay. Thanks very much for stopping though."
If the student insisted on taking the man into the building, the man accepted
whatever help was offered and thanked the student for taking the time to be of
assistance, but then, after the student was gone,
the man rated how much help had been offered. What did Darley and Batson find?
Students in a hurry were much less likely to offer help than students not in a hurry,
but giving the speech on the Parable of the
Good Samaritan—on the importance of helping others—did not significantly
affect helping behavior. In many cases, a seminary student (that is,
a student training to become a priest or a minister) who was about to give a
talk on the Parable of the Good Samaritan—on the importance of not
leaving people in need by the side of the road—walked right past the man in the
alley to avoid being late. It's hard to imagine a more dramatic
demonstration that abstract attitudes, in this case about the importance of giving
help to others, can differ from behavior— not because the seminary students are bad
people, not at all, but because they're trying not to
disappoint the experimenter. Well, these results and the results of
LaPiere raise a question: Is it common in everyday life for attitudes and
behavior to be inconsistent? A few years before Darley and Batson's study,
a psychologist named Allan Wicker published a major research review on
exactly this question, and his answer was yes,
which of course issued a tremendous challenge to attitude researchers.
Wicker reviewed 46 studies and concluded that "it is considerably more
likely that attitudes will be unrelated or only slightly related to overt
behaviors than that attitudes will be closely related to actions."
Now, let's stop for a moment, and I want you to answer this question:
Why wouldn't there be a strong relationship between attitudes and
behavior? What's getting in the way?
We'll pause so that you can take just 60 seconds to think about this and list a
few possible reasons. Then I'll tell you some reasons that Allan Wicker proposed.
Once you start thinking about it, there are all sorts of reasons why attitudes
and behavior might differ from one another.
Here are some of the reasons that Allan Wicker wrote about.
Maybe journal editors have been rejecting reports of attitude-behavior consistency
because they seem obvious or unexciting, a variant of what's known as the
"file drawer problem" (that is, researchers filing away their rejected manuscripts,
with research findings that never see the light of day).
Maybe the problem is that many attitudes relate to any particular behavior, and
many behaviors relate to any particular attitude.
So, it may be that a behavior is inconsistent with one attitude in order
to be consistent with another. For instance, maybe you use a plastic cup
because you're in a hurry—you don't want to be late to a class or to your job,
just as Darley and Batson's seminary
students didn't want to be late to give their talk.
Wicker also noted that attitude items tended to be more general than behaviors.
In LaPiere's case, for example, respondents were surveyed about Chinese
people in general, but the behavior involved a specific Chinese couple—
two people out of a billion people. Finally, Wicker pointed out that
attitudes and behavior are often elicited under very different conditions.
For example, people's attitudes are often measured in anonymous surveys, whereas
behaviors tend to be publicly observed. So, for these and other reasons, Wicker
concluded that attitudes and behavior are often surprisingly unrelated,
and since the time of his review, other researchers have found much the same thing.
For instance, a 2003 study found that students who,
at the level of attitudes, regarded credit card debt as
unacceptable, were just as likely as other students to be in debt themselves.
Does this mean that attitudes are never related to behavior?
Not at all. There have by now been over ten meta-analyses
on the link between attitudes and behavior,
and the evidence suggests that at least in some cases, the attitude bone and the
behavior bone are loosely connected, and there are some cases in which they're
strongly connected. For example, attitudes and behavior are
most likely to be related when they closely match each other rather than, say,
having a very general attitude about Chinese people or the environment,
and a very specific behavior concerning a particular Chinese couple or particular
plastic cups. When the attitude is strongly held or
potent—for instance, attitudes acquired through direct experience.
When the attitude is easy to recall and has been stable over time.
When people are made aware of themselves and their attitudes—for example, the
attitude-behavior link happens to be stronger, typically, when people can see
themselves behave in front of a mirror. And when outside influences are kept to a
minimum—instead of people being in a rush, for example.
So, the point isn't that attitudes never relate to behavior, but rather, that
there's often less of a relationship than we might expect.
In the next video, we'll build on this discussion of attitudes and behavior with
a review of cognitive dissonance theory, arguably the most well-known theory in
all of social psychology, and one that's led to some very surprising results.
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