Affective-Cognitive Consistency and the Effect of Salient Behavioral Information on the Self-Perception of Attitudes Shelly Chaiken University of Toronto Ontario, Canada Mark W. Baldwin University of Waterloo Ontario, Canada Subjects with well-defined or poorly defined prior attitudes toward being an environmentalist/conservationist were identified by assessing the structural con- sistency between the affective and cognitive components of their attitudes. After subjects completed one of two versions of a questionnaire designed to make salient either past pro-ecology or past anti-ecology behaviors, their final attitudes were assessed. The hypothesis that the self-perception account of attitude expression holds primarily for individuals with poorly defined prior attitudes was supported: Low-consistency subjects, with presumably poorly defined attitudes, but not high- consistency subjects, with well-defined attitudes, expressed postmanipulation en- vironmentalist attitudes that were congruent with the pro- or anti-ecology be- haviors made salient by the questionnaire manipulation. The additional finding that high-consistency (vs. low-consistency) subjects' beliefs on five ecology-re- lated issues were more highly intercorrelated supported the assumption that the consistency construct appropriately indexes the degree to which individuals pos- sess well-defined attitudes. A comparison of theory and research on self-schemata with research on the affective-cognitive consistency variable suggested that the latter may be a useful measure of attitude schematicity. Self-perception theory (Bern, 1972) as- serts that people often infer their attitudes (and other internal states) from observations of their overt behaviors and the contexts in which these behaviors occur. Empirical sup- port for this theory is fairly widespread. For example, researchers studying counteratti- tudinal advocacy (e.g., Bern, 1967, 1972; Bern & McConnell, 1970), pro attitudinal advocacy (e.g., Fazio, Zanna, & Cooper, 1977; Kiesler, Nisbett, & Zanna, 1969), and intrinsic motivation (e.g., Calder & Staw, 1975; Deci, 1971; Lepper, Greene, & Nis- bett, 1973; Ross, 1976) have demonstrated The present research was supported by a grant to the first author from the Humanities and Social Sciences Committee of the Research Board of the University of Toronto. The authors thank John Bassili, Alice Eagly, Jonathan Freedman, Michael Ross, Diane Ruble, Wendy Wood, Mark Zanna, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Requests for reprints should be sent to Shelly Chai- ken, Department of Psychology, Erindale College, Uni- versity of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5L 1C6. that the less people perceive their behaviors to be under the control of contextual stimuli such as reward or justification, the greater is their tendency to express attitudes that correspond to, or are consistent with, these behaviors. Most self-perception research has exam- ined the relationship between expressed at- titudes and behaviors that subjects are in- duced to perform immediately prior to the time their attitudes are assessed. More re- cently, Salancik (1974; Salancik & Conway, 1975) demonstrated that attitude inferences can also be influenced by manipulating per- ceivers' recall of past attitudinally relevant behaviors. For example, before assessing subjects' religious attitudes, Salancik and Conway used a linguistic device to vary the saliency of subjects' past proreligious and antireligious behaviors. Subjects for whom past proreligious behaviors had been made salient perceived themselves as more reli- gious and expressed more positive attitudes toward being religious than did subjects for Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1981, Vol. 41, No. I, 1-12 Copyright 1981 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-35I4/8I/4IOI-OOOIS00.75