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Balancing things out — cognitive dissonance
A second reason attitudes sometimes fail to predict behavior
is that attitudes are often quite flexible. This flexibility is
perhaps best captured in Leon Festinger's<REF> (1957)
theory of cognitive dissonance
. According
to dissonance theory, we experience psychological discomfort (dissonance)
when our attitudes, beliefs, and actions are inconsistent with
each other. If you see yourself as an honest person, for example,
and you know that you cheated on the last exam, dissonance theory
predicts that you will experience psychological discomfort that
should, in turn, motivate you to restore some semblance of consistency
between your attitudes and your behavior.
According to dissonance theory, you could attempt to restore
the balance in several ways. You could change your attitude about
your own honesty. You might simply decide that you are not as
honest as you once thought you were. You could add justifications
for you behavior. For example, you might try to convince yourself
that your instructor was a tyrant and that cheating was actually
a subtle way of rebelling against an unjust system. Or you could
try to alter the importance of the inconsistency. You might simply
decide that honesty is not something you really care about.
While you would have many options for reducing dissonance in
this example, notice that one option that would not be available
is the option of changing your past behavior. You might be able
to alter your future behavior (e.g., you could take a pledge never
to cheat again), but you can't change the past and, as
a result, future attitudes are often driven by past behaviors.
More generally, attitudes are more flexible than are behaviors.
Attitudes change in response to things that we have done as well
as to things that we want to do.
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