Attitudes, Personality and Behaviour

Front Cover
McGraw-Hill Education (UK), Nov 16, 2005 - Psychology - 192 pages
  • Why do people say one thing and do another?
  • Why do people behave inconsistently from one situation to another?
  • How do people translate their beliefs and feelings into actions?
This thoroughly revised and updated edition describes why and how beliefs, attitudes and personality traits influence human behaviour. Building on the strengths of the previous edition, it covers recent developments in existing theories and details new theoretical approaches to the attitude-behaviour relationships. These novel developments provide insight into the predictability – and unpredictability – of human behaviour.

The book examines:

  • Recent innovations in the assessment of attitudes and personality
  • The implications for prediction of behaviour of these innovations
  • Differences between spontaneous and reasoned processes
  • The most recent research on the relations between intentions and behaviour
While the book is written primarily for students and researchers in social, personality, and organizational psychology, it also has wide-reaching appeal to students, researchers and professionals in the fields of health and social welfare, marketing and consumer behaviour.

From inside the book

Contents

Chapter 01 ATTITUDES AND PERSONALITY TRAITS
1
Chapter 02 CONSISTENCY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS
24
Chapter 03 FROM DISPOSITIONS TO ACTIONS
41
Chapter 04 THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPATIBILITY
71
Chapter 05 FROM INTENTIONS TO ACTIONS
99
Chapter 06 EXPLAINING INTENTIONS AND BEHAVIOR
117
Chapter 07 CONCLUSION
142
References
147
Author Index
168
Subject Index
174
Back cover
179
Copyright

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Page 28 - An attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related
Page 38 - Taken as a whole, these studies suggest that it is considerably more likely that attitudes will be unrelated or only slightly related to overt behaviors than that attitudes will be closely related to actions.
Page 68 - Once we attend to interactions, we enter a hall of mirrors that extends to infinity. However far we carry our analysis — to third order or fifth order or any other — untested interactions of a still higher order can be envisioned.
Page 41 - I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
Page 38 - personality coefficient' might be coined to describe the correlation between .20 and .30 which is found persistently when virtually any personality dimension inferred from a questionnaire is related to almost any conceivable external criterion involving responses sampled in a different medium - that is, not by another questionnaire.
Page 30 - Specifically the subjective value of each attribute contributes to the attitude in direct proportion to the strength of the belief (ie, the subjective probability that the object has the attribute in question).
Page 38 - Mischel (1968) has concluded that "behaviors which are often construed as stable personality trait indicators actually are highly specific and depend on the details of the evoking situations and the response mode employed to measure them (p.
Page 32 - Will you accept members of the Chinese race as guests in your establishment?
Page 38 - With the possible exception of intelligence, highly generalized behavioral consistencies have not been demonstrated, and the concept of personality traits as broad response predispositions is thus untenable
Page 38 - little evidence to support the postulated existence of stable, underlying attitudes within the individual which influence both his verbal expressions and his actions

About the author (2005)

Icek Ajzen is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA.

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