Read Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective Online
Authors: Geoffrey Beattie
Tags: #Behavioral Sciences
Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (10 page)
Citation | Behavioural measure | Did the IAT successfully predict behaviour? |
Karpinski and Hilton (2001) | Study 2: Behavioural choice between apples and candy bars. | ‘… explicit attitudes and the IAT are independent … explicit attitudes predicted behaviour but the IAT did not.’ (Note: there was no time pressure/drain on cognitive resources etc. operating here. In this study participants ‘were informed that they could choose only one of the objects [apple or candy bar] to eat or to take home with them.’) |
Karpinski and Steinman (2006) | Study 1: Brand choice between Coke and Pepsi. | Both IAT and explicit measures predicted choice of branded drink. |
Karpinski, Steinman and Hilton (2005) | Voting intention in the 2000 US Presidential election and also brand choice between Coke and Pepsi. | ‘… explicit attitude measures were better predictors of |
Maison, Greenwald and Bruin (2001) | Study 1: Self-reported drinking of juices or soda, and self-reported dieting. | ‘… significant correlation between the IAT and Ss’ |
Maison, Greenwald and Bruin (2004) | Study 1: Self-reported consumption of yoghurt brands/ eating at different fast food restaurants/consumption of Coke or Pepsi. | ‘A meta-analytic combination of the three studies showed that the use of IAT measures increased the prediction of behaviour relative to explicit attitude measures alone.’ |
Olson and Fazio (2004) | Study 3: Self-reported behaviour of apple and candy bar consumption. | IAT predicted behaviour, particularly a more personalized IAT. ‘… the personalized IAT correlated more strongly with explicit measures of liking, past eating behaviour, and behavioural intentions than did the traditional IAT.’ |
Scarabis, Florack and Gosejohann (2006) | Choice between chocolate and fruit. | The IAT was a good predictor of actual choice, ‘… people rely more on automatic preferences that are independent from higher-order appraisals when they focus on their affective responses [what enjoyment they might get from the food] than when they think about the advantages and disadvantages of choice options.’ |
Swanson, Rudman and Greenwald (2001) | Study 2: Self-reported smoking behaviour or vegetarianism/non-vegetarianism. | The IAT and explicit attitude measures did predict vegetarianism/non-vegetarianism but not smoking. |
Vantomme, Geuens, De Houwer and De Pelsmacker (2005) | Self-reported purchase intentions for real and fictitious brands of green and environmentally unfriendly cleaning products. | ‘The IAT, but not the explicit difference score, differentiated between respondents intending to buy the real ecological all-purpose cleaner and those intending to buy the real traditional all-purpose cleaner.’ |
when there is no mental load or time pressure, when there is all the time in the world, thereby allowing the person to make slower, deliberate and reflective behavioural decisions. Something like supermarket shopping, however, is not, generally speaking, a slow, deliberate, reflective process for most people. It is fast and non-reflective and sometimes quite hectic. So, in a context like this, the IAT should be a much better predictor of consumer behaviour than a measure of explicit attitudes.
Only one study seems to have applied the IAT to actual green consumerism. Vantomme and colleagues in 2005 conducted an experiment that looked at implicit and explicit attitudes towards green cleaning products. They expected to find that implicit attitudes would reveal less positive results than the explicit attitude measures (because of the social desirability factors relating to green behaviour). In their first experiment they used fictitious cleaning products, introduced to participants in a ‘learning phase’ where participants were informed that one product was environmentally friendly while the other was harmful to the environment. They used fictitious products because of the dangers of brand image impacting on the results. What they found, however, was that in contrast to what they had hypothesised, implicit attitudes towards the fictitious green cleaning products were far more positive than explicit attitudes.
In a second experiment, real brands were used instead. This time, there was no difference in implicit and explicit attitudes towards green cleaning products. So the results from this study are a little inconclusive with respect to the underlying implicit attitudes towards green products that people might actually hold. But both sets of results went against the original hypothesis. This study, therefore, left our own empirical investigation into implicit attitudes wide open, which made the whole thing, of course, that much more exciting.
Uncovering implicit attitudes to carbon footprints
We created our own version of the IAT which compared the categories of high- and low-carbon-footprint products and the attributes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and tested it on a random sample; a mixture of students and ordinary working people. To get an idea of the IAT procedure for yourself, try the following example. All you have to do is put the pictures and words that appear down the middle of Tables
6.1
and
6.2
into the categories that appear on the left hand side (‘Low Carbon Footprint or Good’) or the right hand side of the page (‘High Carbon Footprint or Bad’) as quickly as you can. In the normal IAT, items are assigned to categories on the left by pressing a key to the left of the keyboard (e.g. ‘Z’) or to categories on the right by pressing a key to the right of the keyboard (e.g. ‘M’). However, for the examples included here you can just tap either the left-hand side of the page or the right-hand side of the page. As in the experiment itself, you must try to do this as quickly as you can.
For example, the first item in
Table 6.1
, ‘Awful’, fits into the category ‘High Carbon Footprint or Bad’ because ‘Awful’ is clearly ‘Bad’, so tap the right-hand side of the page. (The underlying psychological reasoning here is that if you unconsciously think that high-carbon-footprint products are bad then this assignment should be relatively easy.) The second item, a Waitrose plastic bag, is clearly ‘High Carbon Footprint’ so here you should again tap the right-hand side of the page (‘High Carbon Footprint or Bad’). Again, the reasoning is that if you unconsciously think that high-carbon-footprint products are bad then this assignment should be
Table 6.1
Sample IAT procedure 1
Low Carbon Footprint or Good | | High Carbon Footprint or Bad |
............................................ | Awful | ............................................ |
............................................ |
| ............................................ |
............................................ | Wonderful | ............................................ |
............................................ |
| ............................................ |
............................................ | Happy | ............................................ |
............................................ | Hurt | ............................................ |
............................................ |
| ............................................ |
............................................ | Nasty | ............................................ |
............................................ |
| ............................................ |
............................................ |
| ............................................ |
