Page 182 - The Social Animal

164 The Social Animal

5 months before the election were more likely to vote for their favored
candidate and to perceive the presidential debates in a manner con-
sistent with their attitudes.
In a slightly different vein, Fazio and his colleagues actually ma-
80
nipulated the accessibility of an attitude by having subjects repeatedly
express their opinions or by giving subjects the opportunity to have di-
rect experience with the attitude object. They consistently found that
attitudes that are made accessible in this manner became predictive of
subsequent behavior to a far greater extent than attitudes that are not
made accessible. Fazio’s concept of attitude accessibility provides us
with several ways of interpreting the lack of an attitude-behavior rela-
tionship in the LaPiere study of innkeepers. The problem is that we
do not know how accessible attitudes toward Chinese people were for
each of the innkeepers. Moreover, it may be that different attitudes
were activated by the questionnaire and by the actual visit of the Chi-
nese couple. For example, a survey item mentioning only Chinese peo-
ple may have reminded an innkeeper of his or her general prejudice,
whereas the presence of a young, well-dressed Chinese couple may
have invoked competing thoughts and feelings. Moreover, even if prej-
udiced attitudes were highly accessible and subsequently influenced
perceptions of the situation, there is no guarantee that the innkeepers
would or could have acted on those perceptions. Perhaps the presence
of other guests made the innkeepers fearful of creating a scene. Per-
haps the experience was a new one for the proprietors, and they sim-
ply did not know how to behave. These factors limit the extent to
which a person will act on his or her beliefs.

Acting on Perceptions There is another way that attitudes and
beliefs can influence behavior: The belief can come to create the so-
cial world in which we live. An experiment by Paul Herr illustrates
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how this can occur.Using a word puzzle game, Herr intentionally in-
creased the accessibility of the concept hostility in some of his sub-
jects, using the technique of priming discussed earlier in the chapter.
Specifically, Herr’s subjects were required to find hidden names of
persons in a matrix of letters. For half the subjects, the hidden names
were of persons associated with hostility—Charles Manson, Adolf
Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Dracula. The other subjects sought
and found the names of relatively gentle people—Peter Pan, Pope
John Paul, Shirley Temple, and Santa Claus. The subjects then read
an ambiguous description of a person named Donald, whose behav-