The relationship between attitudes and behaviour - TOPB PDF

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Lecture 3: The relationship between attitudes and behaviour - TOPB...

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3. The relationship between attitudes and behaviour: the theory of planned behaviour Attitudes ! - Used first in relation to the theatre & esp. visual art! - Outward forms express inner reality, e.g. posture involves expression (e.g. ‘An attitude of waiting’). ! - Darwin (1872). The expression of the emotions in Man and Animals: patterns of motor activity express emotions! - In the early days of the sub-discipline, the notion of social attitudes reflected an interest in the shared nature of attitudes and their cultural/social origins.! - Over time, attitudes became more dispositional and the social dimension became less apparent! Definitions of attitude: ! ‘the affect for or against a psychological object’ (Thurstone, 1932)! “…from our point of view an attitude toward any concept is simply a person’s general feeling of favorableness or unfavorableness for that concept” (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980, p. 54)! “a general and enduring positive or negative feeling about some person, object, or issue” (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981, p.7)! Attitudes - central to social psychology ! • Social Psychology ~ the scientific study of attitudes! • ‘probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social Psychology’ (Allport, 1935, p. 798)! • ‘the primary building stone in the edifice of social psychology’ (Allport, 1968, p.37)! Attitude-behaviour relationships: pessimism vs. optimism ! - “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” (Wicker, 1969, p. 65) ! - ‘appropriate measures of attitude are strongly related to action’ (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980, p. 27)! - ‘any behavioral criterion can be predicted from attitude – be it a single action or a pattern of behavior – provided that the measure of attitude corresponds to the measure of behavior’ (Ajzen & Fishbein, op. cit., p. 27). ! Evidence of a gap between attitudes and behaviour?! LaPiere, R. (1934)! • Author travelled around the US with a young Chinese couple.! • Visited 251 establishments (e.g. restaurants, hotels)! • They were treated well in all but one.! • Later, LaPiere wrote to the establishments asking whether they would accept guests of Chinese race! • Of 128 replies, 92% indicated that they would not!! Does this indicate a lack of a relationship between attitudes and behaviour?!

- who responded on each occasions from each establishment?! - norm of tolerance or politeness (in face-to-face encounters)?! - typicality effect: “…general attitudes are more likely to guide behaviour toward category members that attitude holders regard as typical rather than those they regard as atypical” (Lord et al, 1991, p. 551)! An example of the importance of measurement methods:! (Weigel & Newman, 1976)! Davidson & Jaccard (1979)! • Women (N = 244); longitudinal study! • Questionnaire about birth control methods! • Measures of… general attitudes (their attitude towards birth control) to very specific attitudes (their attitude towards using birth control pills during the next two years)!

• Two years later, participants were asked if they had used birth control pills since the interview!

‘Correspondence’ (Davidson & Jaccard, 1979)!

Attitude-behaviour relationships: optimism ! ‘any behavioral criterion can be predicted from attitude – be it a single action or a pattern of behavior – provided that the measure of attitude corresponds to the measure of behavior’ (Ajzen & Fishbein, op. cit., p.27). ! !

^ Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980! (Explicit) measures of attitude ! e.g. “ My attitude towards smoking cigs during the next 12 months is….”! $ $ - then answer from 7 point scale (extremely unfavourable to extremely favourable)! Behavioural beliefs & Outcome evaluations ! ‘Behavioural beliefs’ refer to a person’s beliefs that an action / behaviour% leads to certain outcomes ! ‘Outcome evaluations’ refer to% a person’s evaluations of those outcomes.! Combining behavioural beliefs and outcome evaluations ! - Example behavioural belief (bb):% ‘My leading a lower carbon life from now on would mean doing ‘my bit’ for society’ (extremely unlikely [-3] to extremely likely [+3])! - Example outcome evaluation (oe): ‘Doing ‘my bit’ for society’ (extremely bad [-3] to extremely good [+3])! - Each behavioural belief score is multiplied by the corresponding outcome evaluation score.! - The behavioural belief x outcome evaluation scores are then summed (i.e., Σbb.oe)! - Attitudes are predicted by the summed products of behavioural beliefs and outcome evaluations (Attitudes = Σbb.oe)! (revise how to work out??)! Expectancy -value framework! cf. Subjective expected utility approaches in decision making (refer to Cognitive Psychology module)! ‘… we do not mean to imply that prior to performing each and every action, people systematically scrutinize the determinants of their behaviour. Rather, we view the processes involved as largely

automatic or implicit, and only in rare cases do we become fully aware of these processes’ (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980, p. 245)! Changing people’s attitudes & behaviour ! ‘Although we can identify the particular beliefs that should be targeted in an intervention, our theory tells us little about how to bring about changes in those beliefs’ (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010, p. 407)! Ajzen (2014, p.3): ‘ . . . the TPB is in fact not a theory of behaviour change. Instead it is meant to help explain and predict people’s intentions and behaviour. Nevertheless, the theory can serve as a useful framework for designing effective behaviour change interventions.’! Subjective norm ! Defined as…! ‘ a ‘person’s . . . perception that most people who are important to him think he should or should not perform the behavior in question’ (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980, p. 57)! and a…! ‘person’s perception of the social pressures put on him to perform or not perform the behavior in question’ (p. 6). ! Normative beliefs & motivation to comply ! Normative beliefs! ~% ‘a person’s beliefs that specific individuals or groups think he should or should not perform the behavior’ (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980, p. 7)! Motivation to comply ~ ‘motivation to comply with each salient referent’ (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010, p.137) The theory of reasoned action ! • The importance of the nature of the ‘attitude object’! • ‘The principle of compatibility… requires that measures of attitude and behavior involve exactly the same action, target, context, and time elements, whether defined at a very specific or at a more general level’ (Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005)! Often, patterns of actions are of interest (e.g. cigarette smoking, condom use).! • • “The accumulating evidence suggests…that the theory is useful for most individuals and with respect to most social behaviors” (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980, p. 245)! • “…at the present time, we see no need to expand our theory of reasoned action” (p. 247)! However…! Ajzen (1988, p. 127) ‘The theory of reasoned action was developed explicitly to deal with purely volitional behaviors. In this context it has proved quite successful. Complications are encountered, however, when we try to apply the theory to behaviours that are not fully under volitional control’

Perceived behavioural control! Perceived behavioural control: ‘people’s perceptions of the the degree to which they are capable of, or have control over, performing a given behaviour’ (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010, p. 64)! “the person’s belief as to how easy or difficult performance of the behavior is likely to be” (Ajzen & Madden, 1986, p. 457)! The theory of planned behaviour (TPB)! - Ajzen (1991) reports a multiple correlation (R ) of .71 between (i) attitudes, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control and (ii) intentions (from 16 studies). ! - Armitage & Conner (2001) report a multiple correlation of .63 (from 154 studies). ! - Ajzen (1991) reports a multiple correlation of .51 between (i) intentions and perceived behavioural control, and (ii) behaviour . !

- people.umass.edu/aizen/! - A recent ‘meta analysis of meta analyses’ of the relationship between attitudes and behaviour -

(in the domain of health-related behaviour) has reported a weighted mean correlation between attitudes and behaviour of% r+ %= .30 (Conner & Sparks, 2015).! Meta-analyses show mean intention-behaviour relationships in the range between .45 and .62 (Ajzen & Fishbein, 2006)!

Explicit and implicit measures of attitude ! • Explicit measures: problems of social desirability biases! • the more sensitive the domain that greater the likelihood that ‘motivational factors’ will influence response to explicit measures! • Implicit attitudes: “are introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects” (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995, p.8)! Implicit attitudes ! “evaluations that (a) have an unknown origin (i.e. people are unaware of the basis of their evaluation): (b) are activated automatically; and (c) influence implicit responses, namely uncontrollable responses and ones that people do not view as an expression of their attitude and thus do not attempt to control” (Wilson, Lindsey & Schooler, 2000, p.104)! Try https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/! Concluding comments ! • The study of attitudes is central to social psychology! • Understanding the origins (as well as the consequences of attitudes) is important! • Attitudes tend to correspond to behaviour (when both are measured properly!)… at least, that is the claim of Ajzen & Fishbein!! • Try https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/!...