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Attitude
 Favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward
something or someone
 For many years, the assumption is social psychology has
been that if you know someone’s attitude toward
something, you can predict this person’s behavior
 That is, the assumption has been that the attitude will be
translated into behavior.
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict
Our Behavior?
 People’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted their
varying behaviors
 Student attitudes toward cheating bore little relation to
the likelihood of their cheating
 Attitudes toward the church were only modestly linked
with worship attendance on any given Sunday
 Self-described racial attitudes provided little clue to
behaviors in actual situations
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict
Our Behavior?
 When Attitudes Predict Behavior
 When social influences on what we say are minimal


Implicit
 Implicit association test (IAT)
 Implicit biases are pervasive
 People differ in implicit bias
 People are often unaware of their implicit biases
Explicit
 When other influences on behavior are minimal
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How Well Do Our Attitudes Predict
Our Behavior?
 When Attitudes Are Specific to the Behavior
 When attitudes specific to the behavior are examined
 When attitudes are Potent


Bringing Attitudes to Mind
Forging Strong Attitudes Through Experience
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When Does Our Behavior Affect
Our Attitudes?
 Role Playing
 Role

Set of norms that defines how people in a given social position
ought to behave
 Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford’s prison study

Abu Ghraib controversy
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When Does Our Behavior Affect
Our Attitudes?
 When Saying Becomes Believing: When people are
asked to present a position that they do not agree with:
 When there is no compelling external explanation for
one’s words, saying becomes believing
 People often adapt what they say to please their listeners
 Foot-in- the-door phenomenon: if you want people to
do a big favor for you, you ask them first to do a small
favor.
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Cont-d
 Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon
 Tendency for people who have first agreed to a small
request to comply later with a larger request
 The initial compliance created a commitment to the
cause

Low-ball technique
 Tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who
agree to an initial request will often still comply when the
requester ups the ante:
 Used by some car dealers
When Does Our Behavior Affect
Our Attitudes?
 Evil and Moral Acts
 Wartime


Actions and attitudes feed on each other
When evil behavior occurs we tend to justify it as right
 Peacetime

Moral action, especially when chosen rather than coerced,
affects moral thinking
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When Does Our Behavior Affect
Our Attitudes?
 Interracial Behavior and Racial Attitudes
 Racial behaviors help shape our social consciousness

By doing, not saying racial attitudes were changed
 Legislating morality
 Social Movements
 Political and social movements may legislate behavior
designed to lead to attitude change on a mass scale
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our Attitudes?
 Self-Presentation: Impression Management
 Assumes that people, especially those who self-monitor
their behavior hoping to create good impressions, will
adapt their attitude reports to appear consistent with
their actions
 But there is more to attitudes than self-presentation, so
2 other theories try to explain this phenomenon.
Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Self-Justification: Cognitive Dissonance
 Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of
two inconsistent cognitions

To reduce this tension, we adjust our thinking or change our
behavior
 Insufficient justification

Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s
behavior when external justification is “insufficient”
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Dissonance Means Disagreement
 Dissonance theory pertains mostly to discrepancies
between behavior and attitudes
 A person who smokes cigarettes may be aware of the
studies linking smoking to lung-cancer
 The person may either stop smoking, or downplay the
quality of the study
 Festinger argued that to reduce the discrepancy
between behavior and cognition (knowing smoking is
dangerous) , the person will change either the
behavior of the cognition.
Insufficient Justification: Festinger’s
Milestone Study (1959)
 Festinger asked subjects to participate in a very boring
experiment (turning wooden knobs again and again)
 When finished, the experimenter tells the subjects
that the study concerns how expectations affect
performance. She asked the subjects to tell the
students waiting outside to participate in the
experiment that this was a very interesting
experiment!
 For telling this lie, the participants are being paid.
Some are paid $1 and some $20.
Festinger’s Study (cont-d)
 Later these participants were asked to indicate how
much they have actually enjoyed the experiment.
Festinger and Carlsmith had predicted that those who
were paid $1 for telling a lie to their friends may
experience a greater dissonance, as they had
insufficient justification to their lie to their friends.
 Those who were paid $20 have not experienced
dissonance: “For $20 I will say anything!”
 The results supported the prediction(the hypothesis):
Those who were paid $1 indeed change their attitude
came to view the experiment as enjoyable!
Cont-d
 In later experiments, this attitudes- follow- behavior
effect was the strongest when people felt some choice
for their actions.
 Attitudes follow behavior for which we feel some
responsibilty.
Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Self-Justification: Cognitive Dissonance
 Dissonance after decisions
When faced with two alternatives that are equally 
attractive we usually upgrade the alternative we have
chosen and downplay the alternative we had given up.


Deciding-becomes-believing effect
Can breed overconfidence
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Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Self-Perception Theory
 When we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them
much as would someone observing us, by looking at our
behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs



Expressions and attitudes: When people were asked to
manipulate their facial muscles in a smiling or sad
expression, after couple of minutes they reoprted an
internal emotional state corresponding to their facial
expression.
Imitating other people’s expression help us sense how they are
feeling
Emotional contagion: It is fun to be around happy people.
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Overjustification and intrinsic motivations
 When you pay or reward people to do something that they actually
do on their own (have intrinsic motivation) you find that they
perform this behavior less.
 The reason: This is explained in the context of self-perception
theory: You observe your own behavior, and the conditions under
which this behavior is performed: You perform because you are
being paid, you attribute your behavior to the reward rather than to
your enjoyment.
 Your actions are seen as externally controlled rather than externally
appealing.
 However, unanticipated reward does NOT diminish intrinsic
interest, because people can still attribute their behavior to intrinsic
motivation.
Why Does Our Behavior Affect Our
Attitudes?
 Comparing the Theories
 Dissonance Theory
 Self-Perception Theory
 Dissonance as Arousal
 Self-Perceiving when Not Self-Contradicting
 Changing Ourselves Through Action
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Comparing the theories