MRPG: Type of Information Processing and Attitude-Behavior Relations

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

For over 70 years psychologists have sought different ways to measure attitudes, and to understand the relationship between attitudes and behavior. This project adds to the extant body of knowledge by examining four classes of attitude measures, and by demonstrating how these measures relate to different types of behaviors. Contemporary attitude measures are generally of two types: explicit and implicit. Explicit attitude measures ask people to report their attitudes by drawing on evaluations stored in memory; implicit attitude measures similarly assess evaluative tendencies, but they do not require intentional recollection of stored information. Further, contemporary theories of attitude-behavior relations posit that explicit measures reliably predict deliberative, consciously-chosen behaviors; and that implicit measures reliably predict spontaneous, automatic behaviors. It is proposed that the previous failure of explicit measures to predict spontaneous behaviors, and of implicit measures to predict deliberative behaviors, may be due to a confounding of the type of attitude measure and the level of cognitive processing required by the attitude measure. By untangling these variables (type of measure, type of cognitive processing), four categories of measures are proposed: deliberative explicit measures, deliberative implicit measures, spontaneous explicit measures, and spontaneous implicit measures. The present research aims to demonstrate that the type of measure is secondary to the type of information processing in relating attitudes and behavior. That is, deliberative measures, whether they be explicit or implicit, should reliably predict deliberative behaviors. Similarly, spontaneous measures, whether they be explicit or implicit, should reliably predict spontaneous behaviors.