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The ABC Model: How Affect, Behavior, and Cognition Shape Attitudes
Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 2: Attitudes and BehaviorSection 2.1 · lesson 7 of 8512 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Three response classes, one evaluative tendency, and why measuring only one misleads.
- Define the attitude as an evaluative tendency
- Describe the 3 components of the ABC Model
- Distinguish it from unidimensional and dual-attitude views
- Evaluate the evidence for inter-component consistency
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Attitudes and Behavior
The ABC Model
In nineteen thirty-four, a researcher drove across America with a Chinese couple. They were turned away from one establishment out of more than two hundred and fifty. Then he wrote to those same establishments and asked whether they would serve Chinese guests. Over ninety percent said no. Same people, same attitude, two completely different answers. This section explains how a single attitude can do that. The answer is that an attitude has three components, not one. Affect, behavior, and cognition. The ABC model. And measuring only one of them is how researchers get surprised.
The Construct
What an Attitude Actually Is
Start with the construct itself. Allport, in nineteen thirty-five, called the attitude the field's most indispensable concept. Nearly a century of empirical work has only deepened that claim. The working definition comes from Eagly and Chaiken, in nineteen ninety-three. An attitude is a psychological tendency. It is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor. Three elements in that sentence deserve emphasis. First, it is a tendency, not a transient state. A propensity to respond, sitting latent until something cues it. Second, the response is fundamentally evaluative. Attitudes carry valence, on a positive-to-negative dimension. That is what separates an attitude from a mere belief. Third, attitudes are always about something. The object can be a person, a group, a policy, a product, an idea, or the self.
The Structure
Three Components, One Tendency
Where psychologists differ is in how that tendency is structured internally. The tripartite model proposes three distinguishable classes of response. Affect, behavior, and cognition. The historical origins run through Rosenberg and Hovland, and Katz and Stotland. Eagly and Chaiken refined it into the form the literature now uses. Each component can be measured separately. And each can serve as a route through which an attitude is acquired or changed. The relationship runs both ways, which is the part worth holding onto. Each component feeds the underlying tendency, and is fed by it in turn. The three also influence one another directly. So this is not a hierarchy. It is a system with three doors into it.
A Is For Affect
Feelings, and Why They Do Not Argue Back
A is for affect. Feelings, emotions, moods, and physiological arousal. When you say you love a cuisine, you are sampling the affective basis of an attitude. Zanna and Rempel, in nineteen eighty-eight, argued affect is a privileged source. Privileged because emotional reactions are immediate, automatic, and often pre-verbal. They arrive before you have words for them. The evidence comes from classical conditioning paradigms. Pair a neutral stimulus with positively-valenced images and evaluations shift. They shift even when participants cannot articulate the pairing at all. De Houwer, Thomas and Baeyens documented this in two thousand and one. The phenomenon is called evaluative conditioning, and it returns in the next section. Affect-based attitudes are most predictive in consummatory and aesthetic domains. Music, art, romantic partners. Places where the feeling is the point of the act. And here is the practical consequence, from Edwards in nineteen ninety. Persuasion that targets only cognition, while ignoring affect, frequently fails.
B Is For Behavior
The Component That Is Not the Behavior
B is for behavior, and this one is easy to misread. The component captures past actions, present responses, and stated intentions. But it is not the behavior itself. It is the response tendency the behavior reveals. Self-perception theory, from Bem in nineteen seventy-two, makes it causally primary. When internal cues are weak or ambiguous, people infer attitudes from their own behavior. I must like jazz. I keep choosing to attend jazz concerts. Behavior also works as a feedback channel. Acting consistently with an attitude tends to strengthen that attitude. And acting against your prior beliefs produces change toward the behavior. That is Festinger, and later Cooper, and it is where dissonance theory enters. Now why does the tendency-versus-act distinction actually matter? Because you can measure intention, willingness, or approach-avoidance disposition. You can do that even when the person cannot perform the act right now.
Research Spotlight
LaPiere, 1934: What People Said and What They Did
Which brings us to the study that made the problem visible. Richard LaPiere traveled across the United States in the nineteen thirties. He was accompanied by a Chinese couple. They visited over two hundred and fifty establishments. They were refused service exactly once. That is the behavioral record. Later, those same establishments were surveyed by mail. More than ninety percent reported they would not serve Chinese guests. That is the cognitive record, and it points the other way. Two components of the same attitude, diverging sharply. The finding foreshadowed decades of work on the attitude-behavior gap. Wicker named that gap formally in nineteen sixty-nine. And it prompted the question this section keeps returning to. Under what conditions do the components actually cohere?
C Is For Cognition
Beliefs as a Weighted Balance Sheet
C is for cognition. Beliefs, thoughts, attributes, propositional knowledge. Fishbein and Ajzen, in nineteen seventy-five, modeled this component formally. Their expectancy-value formulation works like an accounting exercise. Take each salient belief about the object. Multiply the subjective probability that the object has that attribute. Multiply it by how good or bad you consider that attribute to be. Then sum across all the salient beliefs. Under this view, an attitude toward a policy is a weighted balance sheet. Perceived benefits on one side, perceived costs on the other. Cognition-based attitudes dominate in instrumental domains. Household appliances, financial products, public policies. Things valued for what they deliver rather than how they feel. They respond well to information and reasoned argument. And they are more accessible to introspection than purely affective ones.
Do They Agree?
Correlated, But Only Imperfectly
So do the three components actually agree with each other? If they tap one underlying tendency, their measures should correlate. They do. But imperfectly, and the imperfection is the interesting part. Breckler ran the foundational test in nineteen eighty-four. He used attitudes toward snakes, and multiple response modes. Affective, behavioral and cognitive measures loaded on three distinct factors. Distinct, but correlated, with values typically running from about point four to point seven. Three things tighten that convergence. High attitude strength, frequent direct experience, and high need for cognition. When the components diverge instead, the attitude is called ambivalent. Ambivalent attitudes are less stable and less predictive of behavior. They are also more susceptible to context effects. Consider a smoker who finds cigarettes disgusting and believes they cause disease. And who smokes anyway. Which response is the true attitude? The model refuses to pick. It treats the divergence as the diagnostic datum.
Which One Leads
The Dominant Component Depends on the Object
Which component leads depends on the object, and the pattern is fairly orderly. Choosing a perfume is dominated by affect. Sensory pleasure is the goal of consumption, so the feeling is the criterion. Selecting an insurance plan is dominated by cognition. Outcome valuations there are explicit and instrumental. Recycling at home is dominated by the behavioral component. Habit and prior enactment let you infer the attitude, in Bem's sense. Voting for a candidate is mixed, drawing on both affect and cognition. Emotional appeal and policy reasoning both contribute to the evaluation. And a phobic object, spiders for instance, is dominated by affect. Conditioned fear simply bypasses propositional belief. Read that table as a design brief for anyone trying to change an attitude.
The Evidence
Three Converging Lines
Three converging lines of evidence support the tripartite view. The first is structural. Structural-equation models recover three correlated factors from attitude data. Breckler did this, and so did Trafimow and Sheeran in nineteen ninety-eight. It holds even when the items are sampled across many different objects. The second line is about differential persuasion effects. Matched-source studies show that affect-laden messages change affect-based attitudes better. And cognitive messages work better on cognition-based attitudes. That is Edwards, and Fabrigar and Petty, and it shows functional distinctness. The third line is neural, from Cunningham and Zelazo in two thousand and seven. Neuroimaging distinguishes ventral striatum and amygdala circuits for affect. From dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for deliberative cognition. Motor and premotor regions are implicated in behavioral intention. Three independent methods, reaching the same three-way split.
Refinements
Three Views That Complicate Without Overturning
Contemporary refinements complicate the model without overturning it. The unidimensional view goes back to Thurstone, in nineteen twenty-eight. However many sources feed into an attitude, what stays in memory is one summary. A single evaluative number, not three. The dual-attitude perspective comes from Wilson, Lindsey and Schooler, in two thousand. The same object can hold an implicit and an explicit evaluation that diverge. That extends the ABC framework rather than refuting it, and section two point four returns to it. Then there is the MODE model, from Fazio in nineteen ninety. It embeds the tripartite components in a process account. Highly accessible, affect-laden associations drive behavior under low motivation. Or under low opportunity to deliberate. Cognitive deliberation dominates only when both motivation and opportunity are high. None of these deletes the three components. They specify when each one wins.
Consolidate
The ABC Model as a Measurement Discipline
Let us end with what the model is actually for. For the advanced student, its value is less theoretical than methodological. It is a measurement discipline. So, to summarize. An attitude is an evaluative tendency directed at an object. It rests on three correlated but distinguishable response classes. Affect covers feelings and arousal. Behavior covers actions and intentions. Cognition covers beliefs and thoughts. Each can be the primary route by which an attitude forms, changes, or gets expressed. And the degree of consistency among them is itself a marker of attitude strength. Here is the question the framework forces you to ask. Which response class did we actually measure? And would the other two have given us the same answer? Sampling all three is the most reliable guard against LaPiere's mismatch.
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