Choosing social situations: Investigating the origins of correspondence between attitudes and behavior

By choosing to enter and spend time in those social situations that will dispose them to perform the actions implied by their personal attitudes, individuals may generate correspondence between their attitudes and their behavior. To investigate this process, we allowed individuals to choose whether to enter and spend time in a social situation that supported the behavioral expression of attitudes favorable toward affirmative action. For low-self-monitoring individuals, those with favorable attitudes toward affirmative action were substantially more willing than were those with unfavorable attitudes to enter and spend time in this social situation. For high self-monitoring individuals, willingness to enter and spend time in this social situation was unrelated to personal attitudes toward affirmative action; at the same time, high self-monitoring females were more likely than high self-monitoring males to choose to enter and to spend time in this social situation. Implications of these findings for understanding the links between self-monitoring processes and the origins of correspondence between attitudes and behavior were discussed.

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