The Role of Attitude Accessibility in the Attitude-to-Behavior Process

Attitudes toward a number of products and the accessibility of those attitudes as indicated by the latency of response to an attitudinal inquiry were assessed. Sub-jects with highly accessible attitudes toward a given product displayed greater atti-tude-behavior correspondence than did those with relatively less accessible atti-tudes. Furthermore, subjects with less accessible attitudes displayed more sensi-tivity to the salience afforded a product by its position in the front row, as opposed to the back row, than did subjects with more accessible attitudes. The implications of these data for a model of the process by which attitudes guide behavior are discussed. T he topic of attitudes clearly occupies a central position in research on consumer behavior (e.g., Engel and Blackwell 1982; Kassarjian and Kassarjian 1979). In part, the attention given to the attitude con-struct stems from the fact that much advertising can be described as social influence attempts aimed at cre-ating positive attitudes toward the product. Indeed, considerable research has been concerned with un-derstanding this persuasion process (e.g., Boyd, Ray, and Strong 1972; Lutz 1975; Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann 1983). The assumption underlying such persuasive attempts is that the development of posi-tive attitudes will produce a corresponding change in behavior. As a result, consumer research also has been concerned with understanding the relation be-tween attitudes and subsequent behavior (e.g., Day and Deutscher 1982; Ryan and Bonfield 1975; Smith and Swinyard 1983). It is this attitude-behavior rela-tion that constitutes the focus of the present article. Fazio and his colleagues proposed a model of the process by which attitudes guide behavior (Fazio