Attitudes and Behavior

Attitudes versus Other Predictive Factors

First, behavior may be guided by factors other than attitudes, although sometimes attitudes partially explain behavior. In 1980, Ajzen and Fishbein developed the theory of reasoned action, which Ajzen further elaborated in 1991 as a theory of planned behavior. According to these models, intention best explains behavior, which is determined by a combination of attitudes, subjective norms, and controlling beliefs. Only an individual who feels capable of performing a given act will follow through with the action, so that individuals with low control belief will have a weaker relationship between attitudes and behavior.

Subjective norms are another major determinant of behavior. They are defined as individuals' personal beliefs about whether others who are significant to them endorse or disapprove of their performance of the behavior. Knowing that attitudes are not the sole predictor of behavior might have proved frustrating for attitude-behavior research but for the fact that psychologists succeeded in identifying the factors that influence the relative importance of attitudes and norms in controlling behavior.

There are three factors that moderate the normsattitude effect on behavior: individual differences, ambiguity of the situation, and the “self” mode in which the individual is set.

Individual Differences

Psychologists recognize that individuals differ from each other in the strength of their attitude-behavior relations. The dominant approach in accounting for individual difference examines whether the individual is under normative or attitudinal control. Within this approach, the most researched paradigm is that of self-monitoring, which Mark Snyder first introduced. His self-monitoring inventory identified the extent to which individuals strategically cultivate public appearances. High self-monitors engage in expressive control, based on sensitivity to social cues and the tendency to be influenced by others' expectations. Low self-monitors do not attempt to appear situationally appropriate and hence attach more weight to their own attitudes. Consequently, Snyder found that low self-monitors show significantly stronger attitudebehavior correlations. Lynn Miller and Joseph Grush wrote that this difference on attitude-behavior relations interacted with other individual differences, such as self-consciousness—or level of awareness of [Page 103]one's attitudes. Nonetheless, as Steven Gangestad and Snyder argued, this theory has been the subject of considerable controversy, primarily regarding its structure and function as an independent trait. Whether selfmonitoring is a combination of more-specific traits or a discrete concept, the variation in the attitude-behavior relations across individuals seems beyond question.

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