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The relationships among beliefs, knowledge, intentions and behavior of cigarette smokers were studied. The results suggest consistency is being restored by stating an intention to quit or by espousing beliefs, some of which evidence factual or reasoning distortions. The concept of attitude has evolved from a relatively simple beginning as a unidimensional concept that re-ferred to the affect for or against some psychological object to a complex, multidimensional concept consist-ing of affective, cognitive, and conative components (Fishbein, 1966). While recognizing the contributions of this change, Fishbein argues for a return to a uni-dimensional view of attitudes. He proposes that beliefs and behavioral intentions be studied in their own right as independent phenomena that may be related to atti-tude and behavior. Fishbein notes that while consider-able progress has been made in understanding the relationship between beliefs and attitudes, little empiri-cal work has been done in investigating the relationships between beliefs and behavioral intentions, attitudes and behavioral intention, or any of these three with behavior per se. A problem immediately arises in any attempts to operationalize the cognitive aspect of attitudes, how-ever, since current theoretical formulations of attitude structure and attitude change do not specify which be-liefs are relevant (Day, 1973). The problem is further complicated by the findings, primarily from empirical research done in the dissonance theory tradition, that occasionally beliefs are endorsed in dissonance reduc-tion efforts that have no logical relationship to the object involved, or beliefs are espoused which do not remove the inconsistency but rather serve to submerge it among a larger body of beliefs that are consistent with the con-flicting one (Abelson, 1959). This study was designed to investigate the relationship between the cognitive and conative aspects of attitudes and their relationships to behavior. In order to deal with the difficult problem of identifying relevant beliefs,
Olshavsky et al. (Sat,) studied this question.