EFFECTS OF PRIOR EXPERIENCE AND THOUGHT ON THE ATTITUDE-BEHAVIOR RELATION

Millar and Tesser(1986, 1992) have proposed that thought may make eith er the affective or cognitive component of the attitude more salient a nd, thus, more important in the formation of a general evaluation. The y further proposed that behaviors may either be cognitively or affecti vely driven and that when there is a match between the component empha sized by thought and the component driving behavior, the attitude beha vior relation will increase. Alternatively, a mismatch will decrease t he attitude-behavior relation. If this model is correct then we would expect the match and mismatch effects only when attitudes are low in a ffective-cognitive consistency. The current study examined the effects of affective-cognitive consistency on this model. The degree of affec tive-cognitive consistency was manipulated by varying the degree of ex posure to analytic puzzles. As expected, the match and mismatch effect s were obtained with low affective-cognitive consistency only.