Attitude–behavior consistency: An individual difference perspective.

Past research suggests that an attitude representing a summary of prior behaviors toward the attitude object is more predictive of subsequent behaviors than is an attitude based on nonbehavioral information. The implications of this finding for an individual difference approach to the issue of attitudebehavior consistency were examined. It was predicted that only individuals whose past behaviors have been relatively invariant (low behavioral variability) and who tend to infer their attitudes from those past behaviors (low selfmonitoring) would express attitudes that summarize past behaviors and, hence, strongly predict future behaviors. In the first session, subjects completed Snyder's self-monitoring scale. In addition, subjects' attitudes toward religion were assessed, and subjects were asked to indicate the extent to which they varied from one situation to another in how religious they were. In the second session approximately 1 month later, several measures of subjects' reports of religious behaviors since the first session were obtained. Attitude-behavior correlations were then computed within each of the four groups of subjects produced by a Low-High Self-Monitoring X Low-High Variability classification scheme. As predicted, only low self-monitors whose past religious behaviors had been relatively invariant manifested high attitude-behavior correlations across all behavioral measures. The implications of the results for the individual difference variables and for the attitude-behavior consistency controversy are discussed.