Page 179 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 161

ethnic prejudice, consumer preferences, and political beliefs. Wicker
found only weak support for the hypothesis that attitudes predict be-
havior. As he says, “Taken as a whole, these studies suggest that it is
considerably more likely that attitudes will be unrelated or only
slightly related to overt behaviors than that attitudes will be closely
related to actions.” 75

The Attitude-Behavior Relationship in Our Heads How
can we reconcile this body of research with our intuition that a per-
son’s attitudes are strongly related to his or her behavior? One way is
to conclude that there is no consistent relationship between attitudes
and behavior. It is all in our heads; we just imagine that people act
consistently with their beliefs and attitudes. There is some support
for this proposition. In the previous two chapters, we saw the power
of the social situation to induce conformity. LaPiere’s innkeepers un-
doubtedly faced strong social pressures to say “no” to an inquiry about
admitting Chinese people; at the same time, they faced contrary
pressures (to avoid making a scene) to lodge the young Chinese cou-
ple once they appeared at the hotel. Perhaps they simply caved in to
the most immediate pressures. Perhaps we are nothing more than
creatures who succumb to whatever pressures happen to exist in our
immediate social environment.
In support of the hypothesis that the perception of attitude-be-
havior consistency is “all in our heads” is the common tendency to
attribute the cause of an individual’s behavior to characteristics of the
individual, such as personality traits and attitudes, rather than to the
power of the situation itself. For example, the inquiry “Why did lit-
tle Johnny fail on his homework assignment?” is often answered with
the statement “Because he is stupid or lazy”—ignoring such situa-
tional factors as overcrowded schools or a poor academic environ-
ment. In other words, as we learned in Chapter 1, when we see
something happen to a person, most of us assume that the event is
consistent with the kind of person he or she is. We would like to be-
lieve that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
Edward Jones and his colleagues call this tendency to attribute the
cause of a behavior to a corresponding characteristic of a person a
correspondent inference: The behavior of the person is explained in
76
terms of an attribute or trait that is just like the behavior. Some ex-
amples include “Sam spilled wine on the carpet because he is clumsy”