REGISTRO UNICO DE CONTRIBUYENTES (RUC)

A number of studies have shown that the manner of attitude formation and, in particular, whether attitudes are formed through direct experience with the attitude object (versus being formed on the basis of indirect information) moderates attitude- behaviour consistency. Typical studies in this area indicate that the attitudes of people who have had direct experience with the attitude object correlate better with subsequent attitude-relevant behaviours than the attitudes of people who lack direct experience (Doll and Mallu, 1990; Fazio and Zanna, 1978a, 1978b, 1981; Fazio, Zanna and Cooper, 1978; Manstead, Proffitt and Smart, 1983; Regan and Fazio, 1977). For example, Regan and Fazio (1977) found that college students with direct prior experience of a housing crisis demonstrated greater consistency between their attitudes and behavioural attempts to alleviate the crisis (e.g. sign a petition) compared to students with similar attitudes but without prior experience. In a subsequent laboratory experiment, subjects who indicated their attitude toward a variety of puzzle types after working on examples of each, displayed greater consistency between these attitudes and subsequent behaviour in a free play situation than subjects with attitudes formed on

^ Shiffrin and Dumais (1981) characterise as automatic any process that leads to the activation of some response ‘whenever a given set of external initiating stimuli are presented, regardless o f a subject’s attempt to ignore or bypass the distraction’ (p. 117). By contrast,

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the basis of information provided by the experimenter (Regan and Fazio, 1977). Similarly, R. E. Smith and Swinyard (1983) found that product attitudes based on product trial predicted subsequent purchase behaviour better than attitudes based on product advertising.

Fazio and Zanna (1978a) suggest that the impact of direct versus indirect experience with the attitude object on attitude-behaviour consistency might be mediated by the degree of certainty/confidence with which an attitude is held. In a study on attitudes towards psychological research, the consistency between subjects’ attitudes towards participating in psychological experiments and the number of experiments in which they volunteered to participate was shown to be significantly related to both the amount of direct experience upon which subjects’ attitudes were based and the degree of certainty with which those attitudes were held. These two attitudinal qualities were significantly intercorrelated, suggesting that direct experience with an attitude object may produce an attitude that is more confidently held than an attitude that is formed through indirect means (Fazio and Zanna, 1978a, 1978b).

However, attitude certainty/confidence can also have a direct, independent effect on attitude-behaviour consistency. For example, Fazio and Zanna (1978b, experiment 2) found that, regardless of the manner of attitude formation, subjects who were led to believe that they held their attitudes towards various intellectual puzzles confidently (by means of bogus physiological feedback on their own rating of attitude confidence) displayed greater attitude-behaviour consistency than subjects led to believe that they held their attitudes with little confidence. Similarly, Warland and Sample (1973) found that subjects’ certainty in their responses to several Likert items

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about voting for a student government moderated the relationship between these responses and several criterion variables.

Research has also revealed that attitudes based on a substantial amount o f information about the attitude object are strong predictors of subsequent behaviour (Davidson, 1995). Kallgren and W ood (1985) demonstrated that positive attitudes towards preservation of the environment led to more consistent subsequent preservation behaviours (e.g. participating in a recycling project, signing a pro- environmental petition) for individuals with greater amounts of relevant knowledge. In a study comparing intention-behaviour correlations among participants with varying amounts of information relevant to behaviours in the political domain and in the health domain (operationalisations of amount of information comprised of either actual listing of information available in memory or self-reports o f how well informed respondents considered themselves to be), Davidson, Yantis, Norwood and M ontano (1985) demonstrated that correlations were significantly higher for respondents who were more informed about the issue concerned (or those who reported being more informed). Importantly, the effect of the amount of information was significant even after the effect of direct experience and attitude certainty had been partialled out.

The temporal stability of attitudes has also been found to moderate the attitude-behaviour relationship. Attitudes that are stable over time are better predictors of behaviour than less stable attitudes. Schwartz (1978) found that a specific attitude towards altruistic actions (e.g. tutoring bhnd children) and its corresponding behaviour correlated more strongly among those whose general set of altruistic attitudes showed high rather than low temporal stability, although stability of the specific attitude did not moderate this correlation. Similarly, Davidson and Jaccard (1979), in a study on

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contraceptive use and attempted conception, found large moderating effects o f attitude stability.

Consistency between the affective and cognitive components of an attitude (Rosenberg and Hovland, 1960) has been thought to be indicative of a well-thought- out attitude (Rosenberg, 1960) and has been associated with high attitude-behaviour correspondence. For example, R. Norman (1975) found affective-cognitive consistency

to have a moderating effect on the relation between subjects’ attitudes towards participating in psychological experiments and their actual behaviour when presented with an opportunity to volunteer as subjects.

Attitude ambivalence, defined as the degree to which an attitude object is evaluated both positively and negatively by the same individual (Thomson, Zanna and Griffin, 1995), has also been found to regulate the consistency between attitudes and behaviour. For instance, Moore (1973) found that the correlation between subjects’ attitudes toward capital punishment and whether or not they would vote to have capital punishment reinstated was moderated by the ambivalence of these attitudes. Subjects with attitudes classified as highly ambivalent demonstrated behaviour that was less predictable than that of subjects with attitudes o f low ambivalence.

Also, attitude extremity, i.e. the degree of favourableness or unfavourableness towards the attitude object, has been shown to moderate attitude-behaviour consistency. In a study on attitudes towards withdrawal of the USA from Viemam (conducted during September 1966 through December 1969), Petersen and Dutton (1975) found that respondents’ actual participation in demonstrations against USA military policy varied as a function of the extremity of their attitudes.

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Furthermore, various personality factors, such as need fo r cognition (Cohen, Stotland and Wolf, 1955) and self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974), have been found to moderate the consistency between attitudes and behaviour. For example, Cacioppo, Petty, Kao and Rodriguez (1986) found that individuals high in need for cognition (i.e. individuals with a tendency to engage in and enjoy cognitive endeavours) held attitudes that were more predictive of their voting intentions and subsequent reports of voting behaviour than individuals low in need for cognition. Evidence also suggests that individuals who do not tend to engage in self-presentation, that is, individuals who are low in self-monitoring, show greater attitude-behaviour consistency than individuals high in self-monitoring (Snyder and Gangestad, 1986; Zanna, Olson and Fazio, 1981).

Among the many factors that enhance or attenuate the impact of attitudes on behaviour two variables are of particular relevance to this thesis: involvement with the attitude object and attitude accessibility. Involvement is commonly defined as the perceived personal relevance and importance of the attitude object (Petty and Cacioppo, 1979). Empirical evidence shows that high involvement with the attitude object enhances the consistency between attitudes and behaviour (e.g. Budd and Spencer, 1984; Petersen and Dutton, 1975; Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann, 1983). The importance of involvement in the study o f the attitude-behaviour relationship stems, at least partly, from the fact that involvement determines the extent of cognitive elaboration of information during attitude formation (Chaiken, 1980; Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). The moderating impact o f involvement on attitude-behaviour consistency will therefore be examined after reviewing the effects of the variable on attitude formation (Chapter 3).

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Attitude accessibility reflects the strength of the memory link between the attitude object and its corresponding evaluation. Several studies have established the importance of attitude accessibility as a moderator o f attitude-behaviour consistency (e.g. Fazio, Powell and Williams, 1989; Fazio and Williams, 1986). The impact of this variable on the attitude-behaviour relationship will be examined after discussing Fazio’s (1986) model of automatic attitude activation in which attitude accessibility is assigned a critical role (Chapter 4, Part I).