Why does behavior affect attitude

After all, plenty of people support a particular candidate or political party and yet fail to go out and vote. People also are more likely to behave according to their attitudes under certain conditions. In some cases, people may actually alter their attitudes in order to better align them with their behavior. Cognitive dissonance is a phenomenon in which a person experiences psychological distress due to conflicting thoughts or beliefs.

Imagine the following situation: You've always placed a high value on financial security, but you start dating someone who is very financially unstable. In order to reduce the tension caused by the conflicting beliefs and behavior, you have two options. You can end the relationship and seek out a partner who is more financially secure, or you can de-emphasize fiscal stability importance. In order to minimize the dissonance between your conflicting attitude and behavior, you either have to change the attitude or change your actions.

While attitudes can have a powerful effect on behavior, they are not set in stone. The same influences that lead to attitude formation can also create attitude change. Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning can be used to bring about attitude change. Classical conditioning can be used to create positive emotional reactions to an object, person, or event by associating positive feelings with the target object.

Operant conditioning can be used to strengthen desirable attitudes and weaken undesirable ones. People can also change their attitudes after observing the behavior of others.

This theory of persuasion suggests that people can alter their attitudes in two ways. First, they can be motivated to listen and think about the message, thus leading to an attitude shift. Or, they might be influenced by the characteristics of the speaker, leading to a temporary or surface shift in attitude.

Messages that are thought-provoking and that appeal to logic are more likely to lead to permanent changes in attitudes. In order to reduce the tension created by these incompatible beliefs, people often shift their attitudes.

Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Chaiklin, H. Attitudes, Behavior, and Social Practice. Perlovsky L. A challenge to human evolution—cognitive dissonance. Frontiers in Psychology. American Psychological Association.

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We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. Attitude Formation. This view, as we have seen from previous modules, is shaped by our self-knowledge and the ways we think and perceive, which we saw are often filled with errors and biases.

In this module, we are turn our attention to our attitudes. They are the final piece to understanding how we think about ourselves and others.

This module will focus on what they are, why they are important — focusing on the predictive nature of attitudes and finally how our behavior can impact our attitudes. First, an attitude is our assessment of ourselves, other people, ideas, and objects in our world Petty et al.

Your responses to these questions are your attitudes toward them. For most people, their attitude responses toward puppies and ice cream would be positive. We will see in this section that attitudes are a bit more complex than these examples suggest.

When we express affect , we are sharing our feelings or emotions about the person, idea, or object. In the examples above, when we love or hate those are clearly our feelings about the attitude object.

We can see the cognitive component as well. This involves our thoughts about the attitude object, they often look like opinions or facts that we hold.

So, when we think Jenny is nice and always helps her classmates or the discussion board question is boring, these are the facts as we see it about the attitude object. The examples above do not contain a behavioral component. So, we could add that you might befriend Jenny, not put as much effort into your discussion board response, buy ice cream, and pet puppies. Take a minute and think of some attitudes you hold.

Write them down on a sheet of paper. You can use them throughout the module. Start with affect what are your feelings about the attitude you hold , cognition thoughts about the attitude you hold , and behavior actions you take because of the attitude. In the above examples and the ones you practiced, you were assuming that the attitude contained all three bases.

An example might help us to understand — you might only have thoughts and feelings about puppies. These thoughts and feelings might not line up. You might love puppies, but your thoughts are connected to how allergic you are to them and how much hair they shed, which will make your allergies worse.

So, this can be a challenge for us later when we are trying to predict how you will behave around puppies. You love them, but you cannot be around them since they make you sick. Will you pet the puppy anyway? Will your affect base be stronger than your cognitive base? We need to know which one is more important, stronger or more powerful to predict your behavior Rosenberg et al.

They came up with four different functions that an attitude might serve. One of the most beneficial things an attitude can do for us is to make our lives more efficient. We do not have to evaluate and process each thing we come into contact with to know if it is good safe or bad threatening; Petty, This is called the knowledge function, and it allows us to understand and make sense of the world.

My attitude towards insects is somewhat negative. I tend to have large reactions to bites from them and although most do not bite, my immediate reaction is to avoid them if at all possible.

In this way my attitude keeps me from having to evaluate every type of insect I come into contact with. Saving time and allowing me to think of other things in life Bargh, et al. This example might have prompted you to think that this generalization could lead to discrimination, and you would be correct.

In an attempt to be more efficient, I am not stopping and processing every insect I come into contact with and some insects are good safe.

We will discuss how this helps explain prejudice and discrimination in a later module. The other three functions serve specific psychological needs on top of providing us with knowledge that allows us to make sense of our world.

Our attitudes can serve an ego-defensive function which is to help us cover up things that we do not like about ourselves or help us to feel better about ourselves. We can categorize some of our attitudes as tools that lead us to greater rewards or help us to avoid punishments.

So, women might have developed an attitude that having sex with many partners is bad. This has both a knowledge function and a utilitarian function by helping women avoid the societal punishment of being called a slut and then seeking the reward of being the kind of girl that someone would take home and introduce to their parents. The final function centers around the idea that some of our attitudes help us express who we are to other people, value-expressive function.

We see this a lot on social media. You might post a lot of political things and people might see you as a politically engaged person, you might post a lot about the environment and people see that you are passionate about this topic.

This is who you are. Look at the attitudes you listed earlier. Can you identify what function they serve in your life? Most attitudes serve the knowledge function, but are they also serving the ego-defensive or the utilitarian or the value-expressive functions? Pick out an example for each one. Do you have social media?

What does it say about who you are? How does it meet the value-expressive function of attitudes? Understanding the structure and function of attitudes can be useful for us but it is also important to know how they form or why some seem to be more powerful in guiding our behavior.

Often, attitudes are formed from our own unique life experiences. As students in this course you will often find people have strong attitudes about certain topics. You might be surprised when they hold an attitude that is so different from yours and wonder how that is possible. We all have unique experiences that will shape our attitudes, opinions, and ideas about the world.

If your Mom or Dad is afraid of spiders or insects, then often children will develop an attitude of dislike and fear. What this means is we will be able to better predict your behavior toward a spider with direct experience formation over indirect experience formation. Why do you think that attitudes formed from direct experience have greater predictive power on behavior? Well, recall what you learned in the module on the self. You might remember our discussion of the self-reference effect.

We know that anything that is connected to us will be easier to remember and come to mind more quickly. So, it makes sense that if it happened directly to us it comes to mind quicker than attitudes that come from things that we heard about or saw someone else experience. And he woke up so late this morning that he missed his first two classes. You might imagine that Joachim might be feeling some uncertainty and perhaps some regret about his unexpected behavior the night before.

Although he knows that it is important to study and to get to his classes on time, he nevertheless realizes that, at least in this case, he neglected his schoolwork in favor of another activity. Joachim seems to be wondering why he, who knows how important school is, engaged in this behavior after he promised himself that he was going home to study. People have an avid interest in understanding the causes of behavior, both theirs and others, and doing so helps us meet the important goals of other-concern and self-concern.

If we can better understand how and why the other people around us act the way they do, then we will have a better chance of avoiding harm from others and a better chance of getting those other people to cooperate with and like us. And if we have a better idea of understanding the causes of our own behavior, we can better work to keep that behavior in line with our preferred plans and goals.

In some cases, people may be unsure about their attitudes toward different attitude objects. For instance, perhaps Joachim is a bit unsure about his attitude toward schoolwork versus listening to music and this uncertainty certainly seems to be increasing in light of his recent behavior. Might Joachim look at his own behavior to help him determine his thoughts and feelings, just as he might look at the behavior of others to understand why they act the way that they do?

Eliot Aronson and J. Merrill Carlsmith conducted an experiment to determine whether young children might look at their own behavior to help determine their attitudes toward toys.

In their research, they first had the children rate the attractiveness of several toys. They then chose a toy that a child had just indicated he or she really wanted to play with and—this was rather mean—told that child he or she could not play with that toy. Furthermore, and according to random assignment to conditions, half of the children were threatened with mild punishment if they disobeyed and the other half were threatened with severe punishment.

If you play with it, I would be very angry. I would have to take all of my toys and go home and never come back again. It turned out that both the harsh and the mild threat were sufficient to prevent the children from playing with the forbidden toy—none of the children actually did so. Nevertheless, when the experimenter returned to the room and asked each child to again rate how much he or she liked the forbidden toy, the children who had received the harsh threat rated the toy significantly more positively than the children who had received the mild threat.

Furthermore, the children who had only received the mild threat actually rated the forbidden toy less positively than they had at the beginning of the experiment. And this change was long lasting. Even when tested several weeks later, children still showed these changes Freedman, Assume for a moment that the children were a bit unsure about how much they liked the toy that they did not play with and that they needed some information to determine their beliefs.

The children in the harsh threat condition had a strong external reason for not having played with the toy—they were going to get into really big trouble if they did. Because these children likely saw the social situation as the cause of their behavior, they found it easy to believe that they still liked the toy a lot. For the children in the mild threat condition, however, the external reasons for their behavior were not so apparent—they had only been asked not to play with the toy.

These children were more likely to conclude that their behavior was caused by internal, personal factors—that they did not play with the toy simply because they did not like it that much. We can use the principles of self-perception to help understand how Joachim is interpreting his behavior of staying out all night at the club rather than studying. When Joachim looks at this behavior, he may start to wonder why he engaged in it. One answer is that the social situation caused the behavior; that is, he might decide that the band he heard last night was so fantastic that he simply had to go hear them and could not possibly have left the club early.

Blaming the situation for the behavior allows him to avoid blaming himself for it and to avoid facing the fact that he found listening to music more important than his schoolwork.

But the fact that Joachim is a bit worried about his unusual behavior suggests that he, at least in part, might be starting to wonder about his own motivations. Perhaps you have experienced the effects of self-perception. Have you ever found yourself becoming more convinced about an argument you were making as you heard yourself making it?

Or did you ever realize how thirsty you must have been as you quickly drank a big glass of water? Research has shown that self-perception occurs regularly and in many different domains. For instance, Gary Wells and Richard Petty found that people who were asked to shake their heads up and down rather than sideways while reading arguments favoring or opposing tuition increases at their school ended up agreeing with the arguments more, and Daryl Bem found that when people were told by the experimenter to say that certain cartoons were funny, they ended up actually finding those cartoons funnier.

It appears in these cases that people looked at their own behavior: if they moved their head up and down or said that the cartoons were funny, they figured that they must agree with the arguments and like the cartoon. You may recall that one common finding in social psychology is that people frequently do not realize the extent to which behavior is influenced by the social situation. Although this is particularly true for the behavior of others, in some cases it may apply to understanding our own behavior as well.

This means that, at least in some cases, we may believe that we have chosen to engage in a behavior for personal reasons, even though external, situational factors have actually led us to it. Consider again the children who did not play with the forbidden toy in the Aronson and Carlsmith study, even though they were given only a mild reason for not doing so. When the social situation actually causes our behavior, but we do not realize that the social situation was the cause , we call the phenomenon insufficient justification.

Insufficient justification occurs when the threat or reward is actually sufficient to get the person to engage in or to avoid a behavior, but the threat or reward is insufficient to allow the person to conclude that the situation caused the behavior. Although insufficient justification may lead people to like something less because they incorrectly infer that the reason they did not engage in a behavior was due to internal reasons, it is also possible that the opposite may occur.

People may in some cases come to like a task less when they perceive that they did engage in it for external reasons. First, they placed some fun felt-tipped markers into the classroom of the children they were studying.

The children loved the markers and played with them right away. Then, the markers were taken out of the classroom and the children were given a chance to play with the markers individually at an experimental session with the researcher.

At the research session, the children were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups. One group of children the expected reward condition was told that if they played with the markers they would receive a good-drawing award. A second group the unexpected reward condition also played with the markers and got the award—but they were not told ahead of time that they would be receiving the award it came as a surprise after the session.

The third group the no reward condition played with the markers too but got no award. Then, the researchers placed the markers back in the classroom and observed how much the children in each of the three groups played with them. The results are shown in Figure 4. Expecting to receive the award at the session had undermined their initial interest in the markers.

Although this might not seem logical at first, it is exactly what is expected on the basis of the principle of overjustification. When the children had to choose whether to play with the markers when the markers reappeared in the classroom, they based their decision on their own prior behavior. The children in the no reward condition group and the children in the unexpected reward condition group realized that they played with the markers because they liked them.

Children in the expected award condition group, however, remembered that they were promised a reward for the activity before they played with the markers the last time. These children were more likely to infer that they play with the markers mostly for the external reward, and because they did not expect to get any reward for playing with the markers in the classroom, they discounted the possibility that they enjoyed playing the markers because they liked them.

As a result, they played less frequently with the markers compared with the children in the other groups. This research suggests that, although giving rewards may in many cases lead us to perform an activity more frequently or with more effort, reward may not always increase our liking for the activity.

In some cases, reward may actually make us like an activity less than we did before we were rewarded for it. And this outcome is particularly likely when the reward is perceived as an obvious attempt on the part of others to get us to do something.

When children are given money by their parents to get good grades in school, they may improve their school performance to gain the reward. But at the same time their liking for school may decrease. In short, when we use harsh punishments we may prevent a behavior from occurring. Perhaps a consistent reminder of the appropriateness of the activity would be enough to engage the activity, making a stronger reprimand or other punishment unnecessary.

The problem, of course, is finding the right balance between reinforcement and overreinforcement. If we want our child to avoid playing in the street, and if we provide harsh punishment for disobeying, we may prevent the behavior but not change the attitude. The child may not play in the street while we are watching but may do so when we leave.

Providing less punishment is more likely to lead the child to actually change his or her beliefs about the appropriateness of the behavior, but the punishment must be enough to prevent the undesired behavior in the first place. The moral is clear: if we want someone to develop a strong attitude, we should use the smallest reward or punishment that is effective in producing the desired behavior.

How will he ever explain that to his parents? What were at first relatively small discrepancies between self-concept and behavior are starting to snowball, and they are starting to have more affective consequences.

Leon Festinger and J. Merrill Carlsmith conducted an important study designed to demonstrate the extent to which behaviors that are discrepant from our initial beliefs can create cognitive dissonance and can influence attitudes.

College students participated in an experiment in which they were asked to work on a task that was incredibly boring such as turning pegs on a peg board and lasted for a full hour. After they had finished the task, the experimenter explained that the assistant who normally helped convince people to participate in the study was unavailable and that he could use some help persuading the next person that the task was going to be interesting and enjoyable.

The experimenter explained that it would be much more convincing if a fellow student rather than the experimenter delivered this message and asked the participant if he would be willing do to it. Thus with his request the experimenter induced the participants to lie about the task to another student, and all the participants agreed to do so. The experimental manipulation involved the amount of money the students were paid to tell the lie.

After the participants had told the lie, an interviewer asked each of them how much they had enjoyed the task they had performed earlier in the experiment.

As you can see in Figure 4. Festinger explained the results of this study in terms of consistency and inconsistency among cognitions. He hypothesized that some thoughts might be dissonant , in the sense that they made us feel uncomfortable, while other thoughts were more consonant , in the sense that they made us feel good. He argued that people may feel an uncomfortable state which he called cognitive dissonance when they have many dissonant thoughts—for instance, between the idea that a they are smart and decent people and b they nevertheless told a lie to another student for only a small payment.

Thus Joachim is likely feeling cognitive dissonance because he has acted against his better judgment and these behaviors are having some real consequences for him. The dissonant thoughts involve a his perception of himself as a hardworking student, compared with b his recent behaviors that do not support that idea. Our expectation is that Joachim will not enjoy these negative feelings and will attempt to get rid of them.

He can do so in a number of ways. One possibility is that Joachim could simply change his behavior by starting to study more and go out less. If he is successful in doing this, his dissonance will clearly be reduced and he can again feel good about himself.

But it seems that he has not been very successful in this regard—over the past weeks he has continually put off studying for listening to music. A second option is to attempt to reduce his dissonant cognitions—those that threaten his self-esteem. If he can make the negative behaviors seem less important, dissonance will be reduced.

For instance, Joachim might try to convince himself that he is going to become an important record producer some day and that it is therefore essential that he attend many concerts. When Joachim takes this route he changes his beliefs to be more in line with his behavior, and the outcome is that he has now restored attitude consistency. His behaviors no longer seem as discrepant from his attitudes as they were before, and when consistency is restored, dissonance is reduced.

What the principles of cognitive dissonance suggest, then, is that we may frequently spend more energy convincing ourselves that we are good people than we do thinking of ourselves accurately. Of course we do this because viewing ourselves negatively is painful. Cognitive dissonance is an important social psychological principle that can explain how attitudes follow behavior in many domains of our everyday life.

But rather than accepting this negative feeling, they frequently attempt to engage in behaviors that reduce dissonance.