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.

Comments

This article was originally published in The Behavior Analyst. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Journal

The Behavior Analyst

Rights

Copyright © 2017, Association for Behavior Analysis International

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