Attitude-Behavior Congruity, Mindfulness, and Self-Focused Attention: A Behavior-Analytic Reconstruction
Document Type
Article
Department or Administrative Unit
Psychology
Publication Date
1994
Abstract
Social psychologists have responded to research reporting low agreement between attitude measures and related behavior with attempts to explain the incongruities and enhance agreement. This article examines attitude-behavior incongruity from a behavior-analytic point of view. Traditional and behavior-analytic views of attitudes and behaviors are compared. In the behavior-analytic view, answering an attitude scale should be considered as behavior displayed by a person under rather unusual social conditions, not as a reflection of an enduring personal disposition. Reasons why questionnaire-answering behavior will not resemble behavior in other functionally different social conditions are reviewed. Special attention is extended to two representative lines of attitude-behavior research: mindfulness and self-focused attention. Discriminative stimuli in both areas of study have produced more predictable agreement between questionnaire-answering behavior and behavior in other settings.
Recommended Citation
Street, W. R. (1994). Attitude-Behavior Congruity, Mindfulness, and Self-Focused Attention: A Behavior-Analytic Reconstruction. The Behavior Analyst, 17(1), 145–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03392660
Journal
The Behavior Analyst
Rights
Copyright © 2017, Association for Behavior Analysis International
Comments
This article was originally published in The Behavior Analyst. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.
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