The Attitude-Behaviour Gap: Why We Say One Thing But Do The Opposite
Mind-myth 4: It's only natural to think a person's attitudes and behaviours are directly related. If someone says, while truly believing it, that they're not a racist, you'd expect them to behave consistently with that statement. Despite this, psychologists have found that the link between a person's attitudes and their behaviours is not always that strong. In fact people have a nasty habit of saying one thing then doing the opposite, even with the best of intentions.
You see it all the time. People say they're worried about global warming and yet they drive around in a big gas guzzler. They say that money isn't their God, yet they work all the hours. They say they want to be fit but they don't do any exercise.
The discovery of the extent of people's blatant hypocrisy goes back to 1930s America and the work of a Stanford sociology professor, Richard LaPiere. In the early 30s he was on a tour across California with some close friends who happened to be Chinese. LaPiere was worried that they would encounter problems finding welcoming restaurants and hotels because of his Chinese friends.
Out of the 128 restaurants and hotels they visited, all but one served them courteously.At that time in the US there had been lots of stories in the media about how prejudiced people were against Chinese people. LaPiere and his friends were, therefore, pleasantly surprised to find that out of the 128 restaurants and hotels they visited, all but one served them courteously. Nowadays the fact that one place refused to serve them would rightly be considered an outrage - but those were different times.
So it sounds like a happy ending: perhaps the papers had just exaggerated people's negative attitudes towards Chinese people? But when LaPiere got home he started to wonder why there was such a gap between what the newspapers were reporting about people's attitudes and their actual behaviour. To check this out he decided to send out a questionnaire to the restaurants and hotels they had visited along with other similar places in the area (LaPiere, 1934).
The questionnaire asked the owners about their attitudes, with the most important question being: "Will you accept members of the Chinese race in your establishment?" The answers they could give were:
- Yes.
- No.
- Depends upon the circumstances.
Incredibly 90% of respondents answered, no, they wouldn't accept members of the Chinese race into their establishments.Incredibly 90% of respondents answered, no, they wouldn't accept members of the Chinese race into their establishments. Imagine LaPiere's surprise when he looked at the results. People genuinely did say one thing and do the complete reverse. They didn't even select 'it depends'. What on Earth was going on?
LaPiere himself argued that the problem lay in the questionnaire. The questions themselves cannot represent reality in all its confusing glory. What probably happened when people were asked if they accept Chinese people was that they conjured up a highly prejudiced view of the Chinese which bore little relation with what they were presented with in reality.
Here was a polite, well-dressed, well-off couple in the company of a Stanford University professor. Not the rude, job-stealing, yobbish stereotype they had in mind when they answered the questionnaire.
This study has actually been subsequently criticised for all sorts of reasons. Nevertheless its main finding - that people don't do what they say they will in many situations - has been backed up by countless later studies, although in more sophisticated fashion. The question is: why?
It all depends on how you ask the questions.Many psychologists effectively agree with LaPiere that it all depends on how you ask the questions and what stereotypes people are currently imagining when they give their answers. In some ways an attitude is like a snapshot of the prejudices the respondent has available to memory just at the moment they are questioned.
This has led to a whole raft of studies and theories searching for connections between people's attitudes and their behaviour. Many a lengthy tome has been dedicated to explaining the divergence. Some of the factors that have been found important are:
- Social norms.
- Accessibility of the attitude.
- Perceived control over behaviour.
Despite these findings, the picture is extremely complicated and frustratingly inconclusive. Perhaps as a result interest in this area has been waning amongst psychologists. The exact way in which people's attitudes and behaviour are connected remains a mystery. All we can say with certainty is that people are frequently extremely inconsistent.
» Find out if any other mind-myths catch you out.
[Image credit: bowbrick]
Reference
LaPiere, R. T. (1934). Attitudes vs. Actions. Social Forces, 13(2), 230-237.
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I do this all the time. I don't know why, but I think it's because I'd rather have people think about me well and I also want to be lazy in terms of doing things or changing my habits, most likely because I still want the benefit of comfort or whatever is offered.
It's called having your cake and eating it too. People aren't taught that dishonesty and hypocrisy are worse than the fact that you disobeyed your parents, so they end up being dishonest hypocrites who just happen to follow whatever authority represents the one that existed in their youth.
I know plenty of people that are like this, they think quite highly of themselves but in reality are huge hypocrites. It's the same idea as the following joke.
How does every racist joke start?
By looking around the room to know which one to tell.
Great article. I think this statement holds the key: "In some ways an attitude is like a snapshot of the prejudices the respondent has available to memory just at the moment they are questioned."
When answering these questions, the respondents are asked to project what they would do "in the future." Therefore, they imagine, with all the prejudices and attitudes they have in the present moment, and use that as the criteria for how they would behave in the future. And as you know, nobody could ever predict the future - even one's own future behavior.
Tola
http://www.rx4life.info
One dusty study?
this isnt news or psychology!
People are living contradictions, and they rarley recognise it.
I read the "Attitude-Behavior Gap" test results with interest but I must say that the people chosen to respond should have included a broader slice of the American populace. Why couldn't a person who is NOT in the resturant or hotel biz have just as telling a response? The question could be simply changed to If you ARE in the hotel or restaurant business or if imagined you were, would you serve those who appeared Chinese or whatever? That, to me, would produce a far more accurate result. Especially if the survey was totally anonymous and included a space to write why or why not they would or would not be served.Choosing only those in service industries muddies the result from the get go. IMHO. But I am not educated in that area. I am an RN,BSN who minored in Psych and I worked mostly in psychiatric units.
Ouch, I feel let down. The text reads like an intro to a great article, but it just stops with a "uh, yeah, something strange is certainly going on, but we don't know the details".
I feel like Mikal - where's the rest of it? That was one of the biggest anticlimaxes I've had in a long while...
I don't think it's very strange though, that we say one thing and do another. Usually to promote a better image, or a preferred or desired image about ourselves (to a point where we deceive ourselves).
Mikal & Herzleid, I know what you mean but I'm afraid there's no neat ending to this article because there are no neat answers in attitude-behaviour research. Perhaps I'll come back to this subject in a future post...
My landlord is using false allegations with only intention to hurt, e.g. telling I am dragging mud to house (my stilettos are usually $400 and up, so keep wondering if I want a mud). Oh did I mention that this guy had a big muddy dog that goes in and out of the house unleashed?
Or on other occasion when he said I do not recycle and he was crossing his chest as if I committed a crime. The joke was on him when it was reveled that he drives SUV, throws tenants fridges on the curve - and does not recycle. I did challenge this jerk on it - and won in court. I suggest you challenge all that 'nice' people and call them in their face jerks. Do you really want to be in a bad company?
@fouccault123. We are living contradictions and that has been show both in older studies and many new ones reveal details about the dusty ones, and sometimes expands on them. A study being dusty doesn't have much to do with its usefulness. I recommend Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate by Susan Haack for you. I take it from your name that you might see psychology as just another narrative among many, with no more claim to the truth than any of the others.
There is a Harvard study into implicit attitudes that is running at the moment and it's free to participate.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
There are a whole bunch of different tests here from attitudes on overweight people to countries, race, gender etc.
I saw this very thing today. My boss sent a sternly-worded letter to a client demanding he pay a bill. Later when we visited the client to collect the cheque, the client (a tall, blond, well-spoken man) angrily vented, and my boss (a shorter Indian man) meekly apologized. As soon as we were out of the building, he was furious with himself for slipping into what he saw as a colonial cultural pattern of behavior. Despite characterizing his role as positively as I could, his shame in the dissonance would not be allayed. His self-image had been tarnished; the attitude-behavior gap could not have been clearer.
Logan, that's an excellent example... of this issue, and of Jeremy's ending to this post.
Consider that "attitudes" can be defined as those inner feelings which ought to motivate our actions, and "behaviours" defined as those outward visible actions. Seen in this light, many things contribute simultaneously to this gap: personality, circadian rhythms, culture, degrees of relationship, stereotype matching (or breaking), hormonal cycle or state of health, all sorts of other circumstances.
Practically speaking, I want to address the attitude/behavior gap in myself first of all. Not the ones I understand already, like culture and personality and relationship-complexity (transactional analysis, for starters! that might prove helpful for you, Bianca). I want to understand better why, when I both want and need to be doing other work, I am adding a comment to this topic... that's the mysterious part of the whole puzzle, for me.
Just one example of it, anyway.
;-)
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