Maintenance and Decay of Past Behavior Influences: Anchoring Attitudes on Beliefs Following Inconsistent Actions
- 1 June 2005
- journal article
- clinical trial
- Published by SAGE Publications in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Vol. 31 (6), 719-733
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167204272180
Abstract
Three studies investigated the influence of past behavior on the stability of the attitudes it elicits. In Experiment 1, the effect of a bogus behavior feedback was long lasting when people engaged in biased scanning, presumably because this process elicits behavior-consistent beliefs. In contrast, the effect of the feedback decayed when participants were forced to consider whether the behavior might have undesirable outcomes. A second experiment using a different behavioral paradigm and a field study further supported the interpretation that individuals resolve conflict between a past behavior and subsequent beliefs about it by aligning attitudes with beliefs instead of behavior.This publication has 28 references indexed in Scilit:
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