This finding has implications for theory and practice. First, it provides limited empirical support for plausible but rarely tested assumptions about the role of attitude strength and similar concepts tapping into personal relevance in the context of spillover for notable exceptions, see Effron et al. The findings also contribute to a refined theoretical understanding of the conditions under which recalling past behavior affects subsequent behaviors.
This line of reasoning points to a relatively malleable conceptualization of identity that is best understood as a mediator between recalled and subsequent behavior Van der Werff et al.
Our findings complement this view by suggesting that when conceptualized and measured as traits, identity — and other similar conceptualizations of relatively stable individual differences such as attitude, superordinate goal, or values — can influence how thinking about past behaviors affects spillover.
People who have a firm identity or who hold a very favorable or unfavorable attitude about an issue have few doubts about who they are and what they appreciate. It is therefore unlikely that reminders about what they did or failed to do in the past influence how they see themselves, nor should such reminders have much effect on subsequent behaviors. The findings also have implications for practice. It can be assumed that reminding people of past pro-environmental or healthy behaviors Van der Werff et al.
However, using the same approach is bound to be less effective among those with a firm attitude or identity. A better understanding of how different levels of attitude strength affect spillover can also help campaigners use their resources more efficiently. For instance, our findings suggest that people with a strong attitude are unlikely to display negative spillover. Thus, when trying to reduce negative spillover effects, campaign designers could economize by focusing their efforts on people with moderate and weak attitudes.
A limitation of the research is that attitude strength accounted for positive and negative spillover for only some of the dependent variables. This raises two major questions. First, why did attitude strength moderate the effect of recalling a goal-consistent versus a goal-inconsistent behavior for some but not for other variables?
Previous research suggests that when the second behavior is either extremely difficult or extremely easy, it could attenuate or even override the generally positive relationship between attitude strength and the likelihood of engaging in further goal-conducive behaviors Kaiser and Schultz, ; see also Truelove et al.
If this explanation is valid, the anticipated moderating effect of attitude strength should be more likely for intentions that are neither extremely difficult nor easy. However, if the popularity of the dependent variables see the arithmetic means in Tables 1 , 4 is an indication of their difficulty Kaiser et al.
This suggests that the effect of attitude strength on spillover probably did not depend on the difficulty or costs of the behaviors. On a more speculative note, the fact that the expected moderation was found for only some of the dependent variables could also have to do with the subjective meaning that participants attributed to the respective behaviors.
For example, it is possible that participants may have perceived the behaviors as environmentally relevant to different extents Truelove and Gillis, , and that those with a strong attitude were most likely to engage in behaviors they perceived as impactful. To test this explanation, future research could assess the perceived environmental impact of different behaviors for each participant and examine whether this additional information can help to understand when attitude strength works as a moderator.
The second major question is why did we not find any of the predicted attitude moderations in the health domain. A possible mechanism through which morality could affect spillover is by highlighting the violation of personal norms after goal-inconsistent behaviors. This raises the question to what extent moral processes are relevant for the two domains examined here. There is evidence that people understand behaviors that affect the environment to be morally relevant Stern, ; Feinberg and Willer, ; Van der Werff et al.
Whereas environmentally harmful actions can negatively affect both the natural environment and other people, eating unhealthily or failing to exercise do not have immediately obvious negative consequences for others, and therefore lack a critical quality of prototypical moral violations Rottman et al.
It therefore seems plausible that people perceive environmental behavior as more morally charged than health behavior the comparisons of self-assessed morality of the recalled behaviors support this line of reasoning, see Supplementary Tables 3 , 4. In short, to the extent that moral processes play a key role in behavioral spillover, it is possible that such effects — and the corresponding moderation by attitude strength — are more likely to occur in the context of environmental behavior.
Future research could test this possibility by comparing the extent to which moral processes are triggered when people engage in environmental versus health behaviors.
One last critical point is that we used several dependent variables, which increased the probability to detect interaction effects that do not in fact exist false positives. This research is exploratory in the sense that it is one of the first to investigate the role of attitude as a moderator of spillover effects and does therefore not necessarily require statistical procedures to correct for false positives Rothman, ; Rubin, However, to be able to assess the extent to which the rate of false positives might challenge our findings, we used the false discovery rate method FDR; Benjamini and Hochberg, to adjust the p -values of the interaction terms i.
Thus, while the FDR adjustments do not completely challenge our findings, they further qualify the already limited moderating effect of attitude strength. Overall, the two studies showed that the importance of an issue to a person — in our study operationalized as behavior-based attitude Kaiser et al. Additionally, we found limited evidence for the prediction that a strong favorable attitude increases the consistency of goal-conducive behavior, whereas a weak attitude was associated with less predictable behavioral patterns.
The findings are relevant for theory because they point to a possible boundary condition of positive and negative spillover. Practically they matter because they enable those seeking to effect change to more accurately anticipate the effects of campaigns and interventions on different groups of people, which should help to allocate resources more efficiently and render campaigns more effective.
At the time these studies were conducted spring and summer , our faculty had no Internal Review Board to grant ethical approval. However, we certify that the research adhered to the ethical principles of the American Psychological Association [APA] Informed consent was attained by asking participants to continue only if they were willing to participate and if they had read and understood the instructions and information provided. Participants were told that participation was voluntary and that they had the right to withdraw from the study at any time.
Upon completion of the study, participants were fully debriefed. The data were anonymized and treated confidentially. AB conceived and designed Study 1, analyzed the data, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. BH and AB conceived, designed, and analyzed the data from Study 2.
BH contributed to the editing process of the first draft and added additional content. Both authors contributed to manuscript revision, and read and approved the submitted version. Study 2 and the writing up of this project were supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant No.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
We thank Claudia Aregger for her assistance in collecting the data for Study 1 and Selina Hauser and Livia Steffen for coding the recalled behaviors in Studies 1 and 2. We also thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
The cognitive impact of past behavior: influences on beliefs, attitudes, and future behavioral decisions. Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct.
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For example, your attitude toward note-taking during lectures probably depends, at least in part, on whether or not you regularly take notes. Different people may hold attitudes toward the same attitude object for different reasons.
For example, some people vote for politicians because they like their policies, whereas others vote for or against politicians because they just like or dislike their public persona. Although you might think that cognition would be more important in this regard, political scientists have shown that many voting decisions are made primarily on the basis of affect. Human beings hold attitudes because they are useful. You can imagine that making quick decisions about what to avoid or approach has had substantial value in our evolutionary experience.
For example:. Attitudes are frequently assessed using self-report measures, but they can also be assessed more indirectly using measures of arousal and facial expressions Mendes, as well as implicit measures of cognition, such as the Implicit Association Test IAT.
Attitudes can also be seen in the brain by using neuroimaging techniques. Some attitudes are more important than others because they are more useful to us and thus have more impact on our daily lives.
Some of our attitudes are strong attitudes, in the sense that we find them important, hold them with confidence, do not change them very much, and use them frequently to guide our actions.
Other attitudes are weaker and have little influence on our actions. The researchers also found that these attitudes were very weak. Strong attitudes are more cognitively accessible—they come to mind quickly, regularly, and easily. We can easily measure attitude strength by assessing how quickly our attitudes are activated when we are exposed to the attitude object. If we can state our attitude quickly, without much thought, then it is a strong one.
If we are unsure about our attitude and need to think about it for a while before stating our opinion, the attitude is weak. Attitudes become stronger when we have direct positive or negative experiences with the attitude object, and particularly if those experiences have been in strong positive or negative contexts.
Although the people who watched ended up either liking or disliking the puzzles as much as the people who actually worked on them, Fazio found that attitudes, as assessed by reaction time measures, were stronger in the sense of being expressed quickly for the people who had directly experienced the puzzles.
Because attitude strength is determined by cognitive accessibility, it is possible to make attitudes stronger by increasing the accessibility of the attitude. This can be done directly by having people think about, express, or discuss their attitudes with others. Because attitudes are linked to the self-concept, they also become stronger when they are activated along with the self-concept. Attitudes are also stronger when the ABCs of affect, behavior, and cognition all align.
They have strong positive feelings about their country, many positive thoughts about it, and tend to engage in behaviors that support it.
Your cognitions toward physical exercise may be positive—you believe that regular physical activity is good for your health. On the other hand, your affect may be negative—you may resist exercising because you prefer to engage in tasks that provide more immediate rewards.
Consequently, you may not exercise as often as you believe you ought to. These inconsistencies among the components of your attitude make it less strong than it would be if all the components lined up together.
Social psychologists as well as advertisers, marketers, and politicians are particularly interested in the behavioral aspect of attitudes. Because it is normal that the ABCs of our attitudes are at least somewhat consistent, our behavior tends to follow from our affect and cognition. Furthermore, if I can do something to make your thoughts or feelings toward French toast more positive, then your likelihood of ordering it for breakfast will also increase.
The principle of attitude consistency that for any given attitude object, the ABCs of affect, behavior, and cognition are normally in line with each other thus predicts that our attitudes for instance, as measured via a self-report measure are likely to guide behavior.
However, our attitudes are not the only factor that influence our decision to act. These three factors jointly predict our intention to perform the behavior, which in turn predicts our actual behavior Figure 4. To illustrate, imagine for a moment that your friend Sharina is trying to decide whether to recycle her used laptop batteries or just throw them away. We know that her attitude toward recycling is positive—she thinks she should do it—but we also know that recycling takes work.
But if Sharina feels strongly about the importance of recycling, if her family and friends are also in favor of recycling, and if she has easy access to a battery recycling facility, then she will develop a strong intention to perform the behavior and likely follow through on it. Since it was first proposed, the theory of planned behavior has grown to become an extremely influential model for predicting human social behavior.
More generally, research has also discovered that attitudes predict behaviors well only under certain conditions and for some people. These include:. The extent of the match between the social situations in which the attitudes are expressed and the behaviors are engaged in is important; there is a greater attitude-behavior correlation when the social situations match.
Imagine for a minute the case of Magritte, a year-old high school student. Magritte tells her parents that she hates the idea of smoking cigarettes. The relevant social norms are of course much different in the two situations. Behaviors are more likely to be consistent with attitudes when the social situation in which the behavior occurs is similar to the situation in which the attitude is expressed Ajzen, ; LaPiere, Another variable that has an important influence on attitude-behavior consistency is the current cognitive accessibility of the underlying affective and cognitive components of the attitude.
For example, if we assess the attitude in a situation in which people are thinking primarily about the attitude object in cognitive terms, and yet the behavior is performed in a situation in which the affective components of the attitude are more accessible, then the attitude-behavior relationship will be weak. Wilson and Schooler showed a similar type of effect by first choosing attitudes that they expected would be primarily determined by affect—attitudes toward five different types of strawberry jam.
They asked a sample of college students to taste each of the jams. While they were tasting, one-half of the participants were instructed to think about the cognitive aspects of their attitudes to these jams—that is, to focus on the reasons they held their attitudes—whereas the other half of the participants were not given these instructions.
Then all the students completed measures of their attitudes toward each of the jams. For example, knowing that a person is religious we can predict they will go to Church.
The attitudes we express 1 help communicate who we are and 2 may make us feel good because we have asserted our identity. Self-expression of attitudes can be non-verbal too: think bumper sticker, cap, or T-shirt slogan. Therefore, our attitudes are part of our identify, and help us to be aware through the expression of our feelings, beliefs and values.
For example, when people flatter their bosses or instructors and believe it or keep silent if they think an attitude is unpopular. Again, expression can be nonverbal [think politician kissing baby].
Attitudes then, are to do with being apart of a social group and the adaptive functions helps us fit in with a social group. People seek out others who share their attitudes, and develop similar attitudes to those they like. The ego-defensive function refers to holding attitudes that protect our self-esteem or that justify actions that make us feel guilty.
For example, one way children might defend themselves against the feelings of humiliation they have experienced in P. This function has psychiatric overtones. Positive attitudes towards ourselves, for example, have a protective function i. The basic idea behind the functional approach is that attitudes help a person to mediate between their own inner needs expression, defense and the outside world adaptive and knowledge. Daniel Katz uses four attitude classifications:.
Attitudes can be infectious and can influence the behavior of those around them. A positive work environment, job satisfaction, a reward system, and a code of conduct can all help reinforce specific behaviors. Fostering initiatives that influence behavior is not enough; everyone in the organization needs to be committed to the success of these initiatives.
It is also important to remember that certain activities will be more effective with some people than with others. Management may want to outline a few different behavior-change strategies to have the biggest effect across the organization and take into consideration the diversity inherent in any group.
Personal values can be influenced by culture, tradition, and a combination of internal and external factors. Values determine what individuals find important in their daily life and help to shape their behavior in each situation they encounter. Since values often strongly influence both attitude and behavior, they serve as a kind of personal compass for employee conduct in the workplace.
Values help determine whether an employee is passionate about work and the workplace, which in turn can lead to above-average returns, high employee satisfaction, strong team dynamics, and synergy. Values are usually shaped by many different internal and external influences, including family, traditions, culture, and, more recently, media and the Internet.
A person will filter all of these influences and meld them into a unique value set that may differ from the value sets of others in the same culture. Values can strongly influence employee conduct in the workplace. If an employee values honesty, hard work, and discipline, for example, he will likely make an effort to exhibit those traits in the workplace.
This person may therefore be a more efficient employee and a more positive role model to others than an employee with opposite values. Conflict may arise, however, if an employee realizes that her co-workers do not share her values. For example, an employee who values hard work may resent co-workers who are lazy or unproductive without being reprimanded.
Even so, additional conflicts can result if the employee attempts to force her own values on her co-workers. If the managers of a business create a mission statement, they have likely decided what values they want their company to project to the public. The mission statement can help them seek out candidates whose personalities match these values, which can help reduce friction in the workplace and foster a positive work environment.
Skills-based hiring is important for efficiency and is relatively intuitive. However, hiring for values is at least as important. Discuss the positive relationship between meaningful corporate and employee values and behavior in the workplace. Values are defined as perspectives about an appropriate course of action. If a person values honesty, then he or she will strive to be honest.
People who value transparency will work hard to be transparent. Values are one important element that affects individual character and behavior towards others. The relationship between values and behavior is intimate, as values create a construct for appropriate actions. A work environment should strive to encourage positive values and discourage negative influences that affect behavior. All individuals possess a moral compass, defined via values, which direct how they treat others and conduct themselves.
People who lack strong or ethical values may participate in negative behavior that can hurt the organization. Training programs, codes of conduct, and ethics committees can inform employees of the types of behavior that the company finds acceptable and unacceptable.
Ethics statements and vision statements are useful tools in communicating to employees what the company stands for and why. A system of punishments and rewards can also help foster the type of values the company wants to see in its employees, essentially filtering behavior through conditioning. If people see that certain behaviors are rewarded, then they may decide to alter their behavior and in turn alter their values.
This gap can stem from a conscious decision not to follow a specific value with a corresponding action. Culture is also largely relevant to how values shape behavior, as a given organizational culture can create camaraderie and social interdependence. Conforming to the expectations and values of the broader organization is a common outcome of organizations with strong ethos and vision. Such an organization promotes passion and positive behavior in their employees.
Some industries are inherently competitive, valuing individual dominance over other individuals for example, sales, stock trading, etc. While some may view such a culture as objectively negative, it is subjectively useful for the organization to instill and develop these values to create certain behaviors such as hard work and high motivation.
Job satisfaction is the level of contentment employees feel about their work, which can affect performance.
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