Page 178 - The Social Animal

160 The Social Animal

self-justification, we will continue to explore cognitive conservatism
and look at additional ways to protect ourselves from the adverse
consequences of distorted thinking.

How Do Attitudes and Beliefs Guide

Behavior?

In the last few sections, we have looked at how our beliefs and atti-
tudes influence the way we think about the social world. A reasonable
question to ask is: What is the relationship between our attitudes and
our behavior? Can we use our attitudes to predict how we will behave?
For example, suppose I like vanilla ice cream, but you dislike it.Would
you and I behave differently toward vanilla ice cream? Our intuition
says “yes.” Most people would expect that I would purchase a lot of
vanilla ice cream—choosing it over other flavors; you, on the other
hand, would rarely buy it. This is usually true for simple preferences
like vanilla ice cream. But we would be making a serious mistake if
we assumed it was always the case. A long history of research suggests
that in many situations, this intuition is wrong.
Let’s take a closer look. One of the classic studies of the attitude-
behavior relationship was conducted in the early 1930s by Richard
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LaPiere. At the time, there was much more overt and blatant prej-
udice in the United States directed toward people of color than there
is now. Often, Americans of Asian, Hispanic, or African descent
were denied easy access to public rest rooms and the use of water
fountains, restaurants, and hotel lodging. In 1933, LaPiere contacted
128 hotel and restaurant proprietors and assessed their attitude to-
ward Chinese people by asking them, “Will you accept members of
the Chinese race as guests in your establishment?” More than 90 per-
cent of those contacted said, “No!” However, when a young Chinese
couple actually made an appearance, LaPiere found that of these 128
establishments, only one refused them accommodations or service.
The proprietors’ attitudes concerning Chinese people did not predict
their actual behavior.
La Piere’s findings are not a fluke. In 1969, Alan Wicker under-
took a scholarly review of more than 40 studies that had explored the
attitude-behavior relationship. These studies investigated a wide
range of attitudes and opinions on such topics as job satisfaction,