Psychology 3723F/G : Attitude Behaviour Consistency.docx

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3723F/G
• Professor: Martin Kavaliers

Document Summary

Attitudes are regarded as an important construct by social psychologists because attitudes are assumed to cause behaviour. People behave in ways that are consistent with their attitudes. Differences in attitudes should be associated with differences in behaviour. Visited 250+ restaurants etc w well-dressed chinese couple only refused once. 6 months later, wrote to establishments will you accept members of the chinese race as guests? : 1 said yes, 9 said depends, 118 said no. Many establishments have multiple staff, maybe server didn"t get letter. Chinese couple were well dressed status not mentioned in letters. Found average attitude-behaviour correlation of . 15, with only a few correlations above . 30: concluded that attitudes don"t really predict behaviour. Some tried to challenge this, prove attitudes predict under certain condns. Probably the most important insight relating to attitude-behaviour consistency involves the extent to which the measures of attitude and behaviour match one another appropriately if measures match well, then attitude-behaviour consistency will be strong.