Belief relevance and attitude-behavior consistency: The moderating role of personal experience

Examined whether belief relevance enhances the degree of attitude-behavior consistency when the behavioral implications of a global attitude contradict the behavioral implications of prior personal experience in a pertinent action domain. It was generally expected that belief relevance would promote attitude-behavior consistency only for those individuals with little prior personal experience. 68 undergraduates participated in the study. As predicted, enhancing cognitive accessibility substantially increased the consistency between global environmental attitudes and petition-signing behavior but only for those Ss who had minimal prior personal experience with the consequences of an on-campus parking shortage. For those Ss with relatively extensive personal experience, cogitive accessibility did not increase attitude-behavior consistency. The theoretical importance of considering the nature and extent of respondents' prior personal experiences in attitude-behavior research is discussed. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).