As an Industrial and organizational (I.O) psychologist, a significant part of our professional practice is to conduct interventions to support organizations during their structural evolution. Thus, the concept of attitude and behavioral change is quite crucial for social and I.O psychologists. Indeed, it is necessary to have a strong and precise knowledge of the underlying factors which explain why one will act that way and not another. Obviously, these concepts have been largely studied in the field of Social Psychology and several models and theories can be mobilized to explore this question.
First and foremost, it is absolutely essential to clarify the link between attitude and behavior. The attitude, as defined by Joule et Beauvois (1987), can be described as the global evaluation that an individual will do about a specific “social object”. A social object can refer to diverse things: practices (e.g the recycling), groups (e.g black community) or even ideologies (e.g the feminism). Moreover, Rosenberg and Hovland (1960) consider the attitude through 3 components: emotional (I like it or not), cognitive (my thoughts and believes about it) and behavioral, referring to the behaviors related to this attitude. Therefore, the attitude can be clearly considered as a predicting factor of the behavior, despite not being the only one! (consult the planned behavior theory of Ajzen, 1991, to go further)
Among all theories developed in the literature, we think that the commitment and the cognitive dissonance theories are really helpful when it comes to understanding how and why someone attitude and behavior can change.
Initially studied by Lewin, the commitment theory has been really developed by Kiesler during the 70’s. It shows that engaging in a behavior will lead to stronger behaviors in the same direction: for example, starting to recycle will encourage me to recycle more frequently. Through the commitment, the acts of an individual will influence their attitudes. We can differentiate two situations:
When the behavior is consistent with the individual’s values, the commitment will enhance, increase the current attitude.
At the opposite, if the behavior is inconsistent with the person’s ideology, it will lead to a cognitive dissonance situation (Festinger, 1957). In this situation, the individual perceives an incoherence between what they did (their behavior) and their point of view (their attitude). It results in a feeling of stress, as our cognitive system needs harmony and consistency! To reduce this discomfort, a new attitude will subtly replace the original to be more consistent with the acts (which can’t be changed!) that the person has committed.
These theories can be summed up as “The behaviors override the ideas”. Thus, we could imagine an environmentalist psychologist designing role playing exercises on waste reduction. These exercises would probably, due to these cognitive mechanisms, strengthen the employees’s ecological practices and attitudes. The behavioral strategy is, thus, a strong lever to support and accompany the introduction of new practices in organizations; it is crucial for social psychologists to include these techniques in their professional practices.
Bibliography:
Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179‑211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford Univ. Press.
Joule, R., & Beauvois, J.-L. (1987). Petit traité de manipulation à l’usage des honnêtes gens. PUG.
Kiesler, C.A. (1971). The Psychology of Commitment. New York Academic Press
Rosenberg, M. J., Hovland, C. I., McGuire, W. J., Abelson, R. P., & Brehm, J. W. (1960). Attitude organization and change : An analysis of consistency among attitude components. (Yales studies in attitude and communication.), Vol. III. Yale Univer. Press.