Understanding Knowledge Effects on Attitude-Behavior Consistency

The Role of Relevance, Complexity, and Amount of Knowledge

Fabrigar, Leandre R.
Petty, Richard E.
Smith, Steven M.
Crites, Stephen L. Jr.

¹Department of Psychology, Queen's University
²Department of Psychology, Ohio State University
³Department of Psychology, Saint Mary's University
⁴Department of Psychology, University of Texas at El Paso.

⁵Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Leandre R. Fabrigar, Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected].

This research was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grants 410-2000-0516 and 410-2004-1255 to Leandre R. Fabrigar, Canadian Institutes of Health Research Grant MOP-64197 to Leandre R. Fabrigar and Steven M. Smith, National Science Foundation Grant SBR 9520854 to Richard E. Petty, and National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH471678 to Stephen L. Crites, Jr. We thank Emily Cripps, Laura Johnston, Deborah Powell, Michelle Moran, and Karen MacGregor for their assistance in the collection and coding of the data.

Received Date: October 18, 2004;Revised Date: July 19, 2005;Accepted Date: July 26, 2005

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90(4):p 556-577, April 2006.

The role of properties of attitude-relevant knowledge in attitude-behavior consistency was explored in 3 experiments. In Experiment 1, attitudes based on behaviorally relevant knowledge predicted behavior better than attitudes based on low-relevance knowledge, especially when people had time to deliberate. Relevance, complexity, and amount of knowledge were investigated in Experiment 2. It was found that complexity increased attitude-behavior consistency when knowledge was of low-behavioral relevance. Under high-behavioral relevance, attitudes predicted behavior well regardless of complexity. Amount of knowledge had no effect on attitude-behavior consistency. In Experiment 3, the findings of Experiment 2 were replicated, and the complexity effect was extended to behaviors of ambiguous relevance. Together, these experiments support an attitude inference perspective, which holds that under high deliberation conditions, people consider the behavioral relevance and dimensional complexity of knowledge underlying their attitudes before deciding to act on them.