A New Explanation for the Attitude-Behavior Inconsistency Based on the Contextualized Attitude

Inconsistency between attitude and behavior is a major obstacle to research on the predictive power of attitudes on behavior. To clarify the mechanism underlying such inconsistency, we combined event-related potential (ERP) and questionnaires to explore the relationship between contextualized attitudes and retrospective attitudes in the context of illusion of privacy empowerment (IPE). When the participants read the IPE events (including platform empowerment intention, technique, result, etc.) on slides, we measured retrospective attitudes with questionnaires and recorded contextualized attitudes with ERPs. We found that individuals’ retrospective attitudes were different from contextualized attitudes: retrospective attitudes were mainly affected by the individual’s analytic system, while contextualized attitudes were mainly affected by the direct stimulus-response (i.e., heuristic system). Therefore, retrospective attitudes may not accurately reflect individual cognition in the immediate context, and inconsistency between attitudes and behavior may be caused by the mismatch between retrospective attitudes and immediate behavior. Our findings provide a more reasonable account of the relationship between attitudes and behavior.