Introspection, Attitude Change, and Attitude-Behavior Consistency: the Disruptive Effects of Explaining Why we Feel the Way we Do

Abstract

The chapter presents evidence consistent with the observations of Roethke and Vargas Llosa that introspection can be disruptive. The focus is on one type of introspection-thinking—the reasons for one's feelings. The chapter demonstrates that this type of thought can cause people to change their minds about the way they feel and lead to a disconnection between their attitudes and their behavior. It is clear that asking people to think about reasons will often produce attitude change, particularly for affectively based attitudes. The direction of this change, however, has been difficult to predict. The chapter explains people who think about reasons and end up with an attitude that is significantly more negative or positive, on the average, than the attitudes of control subjects. The direction of attitude change is difficult to predict, because it is closely related to the hypothesis about the generation of a biased sample of reasons. In the chapter, there are at least two sorts of harmful attitudes that might be changed by thinking about reasons—those that are undesirable from the individual's perspective and those that are undesirable from a societal perspective.