Attitude theory and the attitude-behavior relation

INTRODUCTION

Ever since the development of attitude scaling methods, much time and effort have been invested in the construction of instruments designed to assess various social attitudes. Karl Schuessler’s (1982) twelve Social Life Feelings Scales provide a nice example of a carefully constructed set of attitude scales. The symposium on which this volume is based was convened to discuss the relevance of measures of this kind for sociology. Apart from the intrinsic interest that responses to attitude scores have predictive validity, that they in fact help us explain human social behavior. The empirical relation between verbal attitudes and over behavior is thus of paramount importance. The present paper begins with a sketch of current thinking about the attitude concept, followed by a discussion  of recent developments with respect to the attitude-behavior relation. A widely accepted hierarchical model of attitude is described in which attitudes are made up of cognitive, affective, and conative components. Further, in accordance with an information-processing approach, attitudes are shown to develop as a consequence of salient beliefs formed about the attitude object. Turning to the attitude-behavior relation, the principle of compatibility is introduced. Although the relation of attitudes to behavior can be influenced by a variety of modeling variables, it is shown that accurate prediction of behavior can be attained assessing attitudes and behavior at compatible levels of generality. Finally, the theory of panned behavior, which  incorporates the principle of compatibility , is described, and empirical evidence in support of the theory is presented.