Direct Experience and Attitude-Behavior Consistency: An Information Processing Analysis

Abstract

Attitudes formed through direct behavioral experience with an attitude object have been found to better predict later behavior than attitudes formed through indirect experience. An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that an information processing difference exists between direct and indirect experience. Subjects watched a videotape of an individual working examples of a variety of puzzles under instructions to empathize with that person or not. Taking the perspective of the person having the direct experience led Empathy subjects to behave more consistently with their own reported attitudes toward those puzzles than Control subjects. The results suggest that direct experience affects the attitude formation process by altering the way in which the available information is processed.