The effects of prior experience and thought on the attitude-behavior relationship

Millar and Tesser (1986, 1992) proposed that thought may make either the affective or cognitive component of the attitude more salient and, thus, more important in the formation of a general evaluation. They further proposed that behaviors may either be cognitively or affectively driven and that when there is a match between the component emphasized by thought and the component driving behavior, the attitude behavior relationship will increase. Alternatively, a mismatch will decrease the attitude-behavior relationship. If this model is correct then we would expect the match and mismatch effects only when attitudes are low in affective-cognitive consistency. In the current study we examined the effects of affective-cognitive consistency on this model. The degree of affective-cognitive consistency was manipulated by varying the degree of exposure to analytic puzzles. As expected, the match and mismatch effects were obtained with low affective-cognitive consistency only.