Narrow Nuances

Chapter Four Reflection

The chapter makes it clear that people had the wrong idea. As we've previously elaborated, there is a grandness to making a graceful umbrella theory over everything. Making a clear and straight path when it comes to mechanisms and structure and pathways. But as always, our complexity is there to foil our plans.

The initial default assumption was that our attitudes, our evaluations, influence and direct our behaviour. Behaviour stems from our attitudes regarding certain things. It makes perfect sense. And to a degree, it is reality. But we generalise quite a bit and we seem to see this as the end-all and be-all, and forget that things don't happen in a vacuum, and that there are always things that interact and affect variables, and behaviour is not exempt from that. And the chapter goes on to elaborate instances where attitudes aren't realised or expressed as their corresponding behaviour, and when they are.

We even looked into examples where a general attitude differs from specific attitudes under it in our mini surveys, underscoring the complexity of anything and everything. You may feel positive about something in a general sense, but you might not be as enthusiastic with every little thing making it up. You might even feel totally against some sub-points. And this is perfectly okay. This happens all the time whether it comes  to attitudes (and behaviour congruency) on drinking, cramming, public displays of affection, joining fraternities, etcetera. You can like a certain artist (could even be your favourite), but that doesn't entail you absolutely loving everything they come out with.

In our mini-survey, we saw that our sample were generally positive towards drinking, but not drinking in excess (beyond tolerance). This is the perfect example of a general attitude having nuances. Yes to drinking, yes to drinking a variety, yes to drinking outside of special occasions. But drinking more than you can? That's not cool at all, dude.

Something more interesting is the inverse. Our behaviours, in turn, affecting our attitudes. This is great because it's a bit unusual, and isn't that easy to wrap around our heads. This, we see, underscores another aspect in the attitude-behaviour relationship. Where people previously thought of it as a one way avenue, the reality is that both equally possess some influence over the other. And the power of behaviour over attitude isn't merely a shallow one. We have the examples of the Stanford Prison Experiment, following Hitler, and explaining away evil and immoral acts that when you really were nudged into such deeds, you now fully believe in them.

The dynamic of the non-tangible thoughts escalating into physical acts is reversed, and we wonder how that happens. It's a bit odd that there wasn't a need to discuss how the non-tangible to physical happens, but there is the reverse. This, I guess, plays up how we are quick to accept what “makes sense” to us, without further explanation. This also highlights how we quickly settle into the idea that what is quick to understand, fast and unchangeable. This makes sense, and it's jarring to get our heads around the fact that there are other factors that play into this neat diagram we came up with, or that a counter-course is equally probable.

I digress, let's digest the proposed explanations as to why our behaviour can counter-course and affect our invisible attitudes.

The first is self-presentation or impression management. We've looked into this in the past, as well as the related self-monitoring. Basically what happens here is that we like to appear consistent. It isn't the most graceful or most flattering explanation, but that's what research seems to tell us. Then we can go back to my small little rant upstairs and see it as another oversimplification we tend to default to. I did this, and without thinking about our actions reflectively, huh, maybe that's how I really feel about things. This is an alternate explanation using dissonance theory that we've seen in the Castro essay experiment. The last theory is the self-perception theory. It's a bit like dissonance theory. There's an ambiguous moment and we have to decide. It's really a bit confusing and what seems to be the solutions is to remember that in dissonance theory you're changing an attitude, while in self-perception theory you're forming a new attitude based on you trying to observe yourself from the third person. It also adds a clause to dissonance theory's insufficient justification with “overjustification” and “dissonance as arousal”. The first clause is simple enough and makes sense. The second, not so much, even I have to admit it.

Of course this base idea distinction between dissonance theory and self-perception theory opens up the idea that you could have a behaviour without having an pre-set attitudes regarding it, but enough to warrant thinking you should have.

Can that happen? Is this me becoming the point of my rant of having too narrow a perspective? If this does happen, is having no attitude before having a behaviour the norm? If that is the case, then self-perception theory is the default by which we gain attitudes? Or at least the secondary if we figure in the culture/environment we are raised in as giving us attitudes and perspectives to certain things we haven't exactly had experience with yet (say, sex and marriage). The book isn't very clear on this. As always, we have to go deeper. And we have to do more studies.