Abstract
Social psychologists have responded to research reporting low agreement between attitude measures and related behavior with attempts to explain the incongruities and enhance agreement. This article examines attitude-behavior incongruity from a behavior-analytic point of view. Traditional and behavior-analytic views of attitudes and behaviors are compared. In the behavior-analytic view, answering an attitude scale should be considered as behavior displayed by a person under rather unusual social conditions, not as a reflection of an enduring personal disposition. Reasons why questionnaire-answering behavior will not resemble behavior in other functionally different social conditions are reviewed. Special attention is extended to two representative lines of attitude-behavior research: mindfulness and self-focused attention. Discriminative stimuli in both areas of study have produced more predictable agreement between questionnaire-answering behavior and behavior in other settings.
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Street, W.R. Attitude-Behavior Congruity, Mindfulness, and Self-Focused Attention: A Behavior-Analytic Reconstruction. BEHAV ANALYST 17, 145–153 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392660
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392660