Page 2786 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 17 September 2014
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The Canberra community overwhelmingly supports the Government’s renewable energy plans with 80 percent strongly supporting action on climate change and 93 percent supporting the Government’s plans to demonstrate and promote new energy technologies …
I have no doubt that this is actually the case, and I agree, but the relationship between attitudes and behaviour is something that has often been studied and researched in social psychology. There are a range of definitions for the term “attitude”. For example, Hogg and Vaughan in 1995 defined attitude as:
a general feeling or evaluation about persons, object or issue as well as a relatively enduring organization of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols.
We may presume from this definition that there is a close relationship between attitudes and behaviour—that is, you might expect the behaviour of a person to be consistent with the attitudes they hold. This is known as the principle of consistency. However, there is also a large body of research showing that attitudes have little predictive power on behaviour. This started with research way back as far as 1934 by LaPiere, and ever since then the relationship between attitudes and behaviour has been investigated in social psychology in research after research.
As this large body of research now demonstrates, it is actually quite naive to think that attitudes and behaviour are linked directly and consistently. While the principle of consistency reflects the ideas that people are rational and attempt to behave rationally at all times and a person’s behaviour should be consistent with their attitudes, you can see for yourself the evidence that people say one thing and do another.
They say they want to keep fit but they do not exercise. They say they are worried about global warming but they drive high-exhaust cars and use air conditioners. They smoke cigarettes but say they know smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease. Another study called “The link between environmental attitudes and behaviour” demonstrated that, when attitudes about environmental issues were measured, their predictive ability was unlikely to be higher than about 30 per cent and could be much lower. As the report concluded:
Results such as this inevitably pose the question of why so much effort is expended in measuring attitudes when their effect on behaviour … is so small.
So while the principle of consistency may appear sound, based on the pub test, it is clear that people do not always follow it and sometimes behave in seemingly quite illogical ways. In general, the relationship between attitude and behaviour is weak. Yet the government trot out this research on attitudes as if it were the answer to life, the universe and everything. Using questionnaires to measure attitudes may lead to inaccuracy in predicting behaviour. Just because someone says they are in favour of renewable energy targets does not mean they will change their behaviours, especially when it comes to their own hip pockets.
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