One of the Central Questions to Be Addressed in Social Psychology Is the Nature of the Relationship Between Attitudes and Behaviour. Research Has Demonstrated That This Relationship Is Far from Simple. Discuss.

The term ‘attitude’ has been referred to as social psychology’s most indispensable concept, and the study of attitudes has dominated social psychology since the 1920s (Allport, 1935, p. 798; McGuire, 1986). In the early 19th century, attitude research was considered to be of such fundamental importance to social psychology that both were thought to be one and the same, and each to be the definition of the other (Watson, 1930; Hogg & Vaughan, 2011, p. 148). While social psychologists’ interest in attitude research may be seen to have somewhat waned over recent decades, attitudes are again the focus of much attention for social psychologists, with a recent review going so far as to define attitudes as “the crown jewel of social psychology” (Crano & Prislin, 2006, p. 360). An attitude has been defined as “a positive or negative evaluation towards a stimulus, such as a person, object, action, or concept” (Tesser and Schaffer, 1990), and much of our social thinking has been said to involve the attitudes that we hold towards external stimuli (Hogg & Vaughan, 2011, p. 148).
Attitudes enable us to define our identity, react to events, and influence how we judge other people and make sense of our relationships with other people in everyday life. Common sense allows us to see the effect that attitudes have on society; people’s views on politics, racial issues, education and even on the latest up and coming pop star, influence and guide the development of affairs all over the world. As attitudes have sometimes also been defined as behaviour patterns (LaPiere, 1934), common sense might also lead us to believe that people’s attitudes tend to dictate their behaviour, or that there might be a strong link between the attitudes a person holds and the behaviour they indulge in, but numerous scientific studies and surveys have found the link between attitudes and behaviour to be less clear-cut, and somewhat controversial (Ajzen, 2001; Hogg & Vaughan, 2011, p. 148). A classical