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Forces That Drive Us: Personal, Social, and Demographic Influences on Behavior
Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 2: Attitudes and BehaviorSection 2.3 · lesson 9 of 8512 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Why attitudes alone predict behavior badly, and what has to be added.
- Distinguish personal, social and demographic determinants
- Apply the Big Five and Schwartz's values framework
- Differentiate descriptive and injunctive norms
- Evaluate the Theory of Planned Behavior
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Everything said in the video, section by section (1,564 words). Read along, or search it.
Attitudes and Behavior
Forces That Drive Us
In nineteen sixty-nine, a review nearly destroyed the attitude concept. It found that attitudes correlated with behavior at only about point three. That is a real relationship, and it is a disappointing one. If attitudes explain so little, why build a whole field on them? This section is the answer that took several decades to assemble. Attitudes do not act alone. They act in a room, on a person, in a life. Three classes of force surround the actor at the moment of decision. Personal, social, and demographic. And once you model those, the attitude starts predicting properly.
The Crisis
The Correlation That Nearly Killed the Attitude
Start with the crisis, because it shaped everything after it. Wicker reviewed dozens of attitude-behavior studies in nineteen sixty-nine. The correlations averaged only around point three. The obvious reading is bleak. If attitudes explain little, why measure them? For a while that question had no good answer. The rehabilitation came from noticing what the bare correlation was hiding. An average across people conceals the conditions under which the link is strong. Behavior is produced by an attitude interacting with what surrounds the actor. That is the thesis of this section, and it is worth stating carefully. Attitudes alone are rarely sufficient. Behavior is an interaction. A weak main effect is not the same thing as a weak cause.
The Three Classes
What Surrounds the Actor
The forces sort into three families, and it helps to name them up front. Personal forces are traits, values, identities, and self-monitoring tendencies. Social forces are norms, reference groups, cultural frames, and immediate pressures. Demographic forces are age, gender, education, socioeconomic position, and religion. Each class exerts measurable effects on its own. But the interesting behavior lives in the overlap between them. That overlap is exactly what integrative models are built to capture. We will come to the best of those at the end of the section.
Personal Forces I
Traits Set the Slope
Personal forces first, and here is the useful way to think about traits. A trait sets the slope along which an attitude translates into action. It does not supply the direction. It supplies the conversion rate. The Five-Factor Model, from Costa and McCrae in nineteen ninety-two, is the taxonomy. Conscientiousness predicts health-protective and academic behaviors. And it does so above and beyond the corresponding attitudes. Agreeableness moderates whether pro-social attitudes turn into actual helping. Neuroticism amplifies the behavioral expression of negative attitudes toward threats. Now, how large are these effects? Be honest about the numbers. Meta-analyses place trait-behavior correlations between about point one five and point three. That is smaller than the attitude-behavior correlation we just called disappointing. But it is additively useful, which is the point of adding predictors.
Personal Forces II
Values, and the Trait That Governs Consistency
Values sit one level above attitudes, and the difference is worth stating. An attitude is about an object. A value is about a kind of outcome. Values specify what sorts of ends the person treats as worth pursuing at all. Schwartz's circumplex, from nineteen ninety-two, maps ten universal value types. They are organized on two axes. Self-enhancement against self-transcendence, and openness against conservation. The ten are conformity, tradition, benevolence, universalism, and achievement. Then power, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, and security. Each predicts patterns of behavior across many specific objects. Then there is one trait that governs consistency itself. Self-monitoring, from Snyder in nineteen seventy-four. It captures how far someone adjusts behavior to fit perceived social demands. Low self-monitors act on their internal attitudes, across situations. High self-monitors prioritize what is situationally appropriate instead. It is one of the most robust moderators of attitude-behavior consistency we have. Which means averaging across both types guarantees a weak-looking result.
Social Forces I
Two Norms, Routinely Confused
If personal forces tell us about the actor, social forces tell us about the room. Cialdini, Reno and Kallgren published focus theory of normative conduct in nineteen ninety. It separates two kinds of norm that get routinely confused. A descriptive norm tells you what others actually do in a situation. An injunctive norm tells you what others approve of doing. Most of the time those two agree, so the distinction stays invisible. But when they diverge, behavior follows whichever is more salient right then. Not whichever is more defensible. Whichever is more salient. Field experiments have tested this on littering and on energy use. On towel reuse in hotels, and on household water consumption. Making a norm focal produces robust behavior change. And it does so without any change in the underlying attitude at all.
Research Spotlight
Hotel Towels: 35% Versus 44%
The cleanest demonstration is a hotel study, from two thousand and eight. Goldstein, Cialdini and Griskevicius compared two signs in hotel bathrooms. The first urged guests to reuse their towels for environmental reasons. That produced a reuse rate of thirty-five percent. The second sign said something different and much smaller. It reported that the majority of guests in this room reused their towels. No values. No argument. Just a fact about other people. Reuse rose to forty-four percent. Now notice what was held constant across the two conditions. The guests' personal pro-environmental attitudes did not change. What changed was the salience of a descriptive norm in the physical environment. That is why behavior-change work increasingly targets the room rather than the actor.
Social Forces II
Identity, and Culture as a Macro-Social Force
Group membership is the second social force, and it works through the self. Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory dates from nineteen seventy-nine. People derive part of their self-concept from the groups they belong to. So when a group identity becomes salient, behavior shifts toward the group's prototype. And away from the prototypes of comparison out-groups. This explains effects that pure attitude models simply cannot. Why the same policy is supported or opposed depending on which party endorses it. Why consumers abandon a preferred brand once an out-group is seen using it. And why conformity to group norms can override someone's private attitude. Culture then operates at a level above all of that. Markus and Kitayama's work on self-construal predicts a shift in weighting. In individualist contexts, personal attitudes carry more weight in behavior. In collectivist contexts, perceived norms and obligations carry more. The claim is not that either culture is more rational. It is that any model ignoring cultural moderation will misfit cross-cultural data.
Demographic Forces
Not Variables. Markers.
Demographics are the third class, and they are widely misunderstood. They are not psychological variables in their own right. They are markers for clusters of life experience, socialization, and constraint. Age functions in two distinct ways. As a life-stage variable: parents of young children consume differently from retirees. And as a cohort variable, since a generation shares an imprinting window. Gender moderates many behavioral expressions of attitudes. Though effect sizes are typically modest and culturally variable. The gap in altruistic helping is the good example, from Eagly and Crowley. It narrows, or even reverses, depending on the kind of helping measured. Public and heroic helping gives one pattern; private and sustained helping gives another. Education and socioeconomic status covary with attitude accessibility. More education means more articulated and more accessible attitudes. They also shape information search, and which behaviors are even available options. Religion operates as a value system, a reference group, and an infrastructure. Rituals, calendars, community. All three at once. Now the inversion that makes demographics worth measuring. They are the weakest direct predictors, and the strongest moderators.
The Four Classes
What Each Class Actually Does
Let us lay out what each class actually does. Personal forces set the slope of attitude-behavior translation. Big Five traits, values, and self-monitoring live here. Social forces shift behavior at the moment of decision. Descriptive and injunctive norms, and social identity. Demographic forces mark clusters of socialization and constraint. Age, gender, education, socioeconomic status, and religion. And there is a fourth row worth adding: situational variables. Time pressure, distraction, accountability. Those modulate which of the other three classes dominates. So the situational row is not a force with a direction of its own. It is closer to a referee, deciding which class gets to speak.
Integration
The Theory of Planned Behavior
Now the model that pulls all of this together. Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior, from nineteen ninety-one. It is the most empirically successful integrative model in the field. Behavior is the direct product of intention. And intention is the weighted sum of three antecedents. Attitude toward the behavior. That is the personal force. Subjective norm, meaning perceived expectations of important others. The social force. And perceived behavioral control: the felt ease or difficulty of doing it. That third one captures structural and skill constraints, often tied to demographics. How well does it perform? Across more than two hundred studies, we have figures. Average prediction of intention is about point four to point five. And of behavior, about point two five to point three five. Respectable for a parsimonious model, and clearly incomplete. Its known limits are habit, emotion, and identity, all under-weighted. And it treats the three antecedents as additive when in practice they interact.
Consolidate
Behavior Is Over-Determined
Consolidating, then. Behavior is over-determined. Personal forces set the dispositional slope. Social forces determine which dispositions become behaviorally active in a setting. Demographic forces mark socialization and constraint, and they moderate both. The Theory of Planned Behavior integrates these around intention. Extensions exist where the original falls short. The Reasoned Action Approach, the Integrative Model of Behavior Prediction. And identity-augmented variants that add what the original left out. For an advanced student, treat the theory as a scaffold, not a closed system. Its value is telling you where to look for leverage. And the towel study tells you where that leverage often is. Not in the person's values. In the room they decide in.
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