Making Inferences from Attitude-Behavior Correlations

Social psychologists have made a number of inferences from the relatively, low predictability of verbal for overt behavior. Three such inferences having to do with the stability of attitudes, the measurement adequacy of verbal reports of attitudes, and the extent to which determine or influence behavioral outcomes are prominent in the attitude-behavior research literature. An explicit causal model representing the key features of these theoretical inferences is presented to illustrate the assumptions made by these inferences and the problems associated with making such inferences in bivariate situations. In order to understand the dynamics of the attitude-behavior relationship in specific substantive situations, the need to go beyond such data is emphasized, and some methods for doing so are discussed. Some empirical examples using data from the existing literature are provided to illustrate the suggested approaches. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN and behavior has long been of interest to social psychologists. This interest has taken two dominant forms: 1) an interest in the prediction of behavior from verbal attitudes, and 2) a theoretical concern with the nature of the observed relationships between verbal and actual behavioral responses. Although the two concerns are sometimes confused, they are quite distinct. Prediction is not concerned with hypothetical constructs such as underlying attitudes * The author was supported by a National Institute of General Medical Sciences Training Program in Methodology and Statistics (GMO-1526) and by post-doctoral support from Professors William H. Sewell and Robert M. Hauser during the writing of this paper. Data analyses reported in the paper were supported primarily by a grant to Professor Sewell from the National Institutes of Health (M-6275). The author wishes to thank numerous persons for making helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper, particularly Charles Susmilch, Robert M. Hauser, L. Edward Wells, and the anonymous referees for Sociometry. The author, however, bears full responsibility for the contents of the paper. Computer facilities were provided by the Madison Academic Computing Center.