ABSTRACT
Perhaps the major reason why attitudes are studied is the assumption that attitudes guide behaviour. On one hand, this assumption seems obviously correct: we eat food that we like and avoid people we dislike; we vote for the political party whose aims we find most appealing, and so forth. On the other hand, behaviour often seems to be at odds with attitudes: we may drive to work even if we resent air pollution, practice unsafe sex even if we abhor sexually transmitted diseases, or cheat on our partners even if we love them. Quite unsurprisingly, early research trying to establish if a close relationship between attitudes and behaviour exists produced mixed results. It turned out that attitudes sometimes predicted behaviour quite well, whereas at other times it was hard to detect any relationship between the two. Therefore, a second generation of research was devoted to delineating the conditions under which attitudes predict behaviour more or less closely. A further generation of research, which extends to the present, addresses the cognitive processes involved in the attitude-behaviour link (see Zanna & Fazio, 1982, in Chapter 13).
