ABSTRACT
Five years before Alan Wicker (1969) challenged the notion that attitudes guide behavior, Leon Festinger noted in 1964 that there was a lack of evidence to support the proposition that attitude change, following a persuasive communication, produces corresponding behavior change. In 1978, Tom Cook and Brian Flay further pointed out that such persuasion, in fact, rarely persists. Thus, even if one could (and recent research in the area of communication-persuasion suggests that one can; cf. Olson & Zanna, 1993) construct persuasive messages that produce attitude change, the newly formed attitudes are unlikely to persist or result in new behaviors. This should not be terribly surprising given the fact that, immediately following persuasion, individuals are likely to return to a “hostile environment” with respect to their newly formed attitudes. Virtually all the information encountered by individuals is now likely to be strongly counterattitudinal. In Festinger’s words, “The world he encounters remains the same, his experiences remain the same, and so his opinions will tend to revert” (p. 416). For those who may be interested in changing people’s behavior by using the mass media—say in the area of promoting healthy behaviors—these findings have been, to say the least, discouraging.
