Attitudes, Traits, and Actions: Dispositional Prediction of Behavior in Personality and Social Psychology

In the domain of personality psychology, the trait concept has carried the burden of dispositional explanation. A multitude of personality traits has been identified and new trait dimensions continue to join the growing list. In a similar fashion, the concept of attitude has been the focus of attention in the explanations of human behavior offered by social psychologists. Numerous attitudes have been assessed over the years and, as new social issues emerge, additional attitudinal domains are explored. The chapter provides little evidence to support the postulated existence of stable, underlying attitudes within the individual, which influence both verbal expressions and actions. It examines the relation between two or more actions that were assumed to reflect the same underlying disposition. The aggregation of responses across time, contexts, targets, or actions or across a combination of these elements permits the inferences of dispositions at varying levels of generality.