The attitude behaviour relationship

Abstract

Why should market researchers, advertisers and persuaders be concerned about experiments with a Chinese couple or a coal mining town in the States in the 1930's ? Or, care about the results of distraction, reactance and forced-compliance experiments conducted in psychological world laboratories around the world for the past fifty years? Why ? Because they are integrally bound into a very basic controversy - do attitudes predict behaviour or only mirror behaviour ? Consumer psychologists share with applied psychologists in other fields ¬education, personnel selection, child development, organisational behaviour, learning, social interaction, politics, therapy, interpersonal attraction, law and social work - a preoccupation with attitudes which hold a central position in their theories. Enormous amounts of time, energy and money have been expected in order to investigate the attitude-behaviour relationship.