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.
