Increasing Attitude-Behavior Correspondence by Broadening the Scope of the Behavioral Measure

Concerns about the adequacy of both the methodology and behavioral criteria employed in much of the past research on attitude-behavior consistency prompted this field experiment. The environmental attitudes of 44 residents of a medium-sized town were assessed using a measure whose reliability and validity had been previously established. During the next 8 mo each S was offered opportunities to engage in a variety of distinct ecologically oriented behaviors. As hypothesized, the attitude measure exhibited only modest capacity to predict performance or nonperformance of the actions associated with each of these single behavioral criteria (mean r = .29, p < .10). When these single criteria were combined, however, into a more comprehensive behavioral index intended to map out an action domain of comparable breadth to the attitude domain assessed, the correlation between scores on this index and scores on the attitude measure was much more pronounced ( r = .62, p < .001). Implications for attitude-behavior research are discussed.