Attitude and Action: A Field Experiment Joined to a General Population Survey

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between survey-elicited attitudes toward open housing and willingness to sign and have published a petition consistent with these attitudes for a probability sample of the white metropolitan Detroit population. The action phase was carried out three months after the survey and in complete dissociation from it. The overall attitude-action relationship is high, and improves when we include additional belief items from the survey as predictors. Information on perceived reference group expectations, material self-interest, and educational level does not prove to be related to attitude-action consistency. We also present data on the actions of survey non-respondents, and on the proportion of people willing or unwilling to sign any petition. Hypotheses are offered for the more positive findings on attitude-action consistency in this research as compared to some past studies.