Linking Global Dispositions to Behavior: Attitudes and Traits
Of all the current areas in social psychology, the one where the use of what we have referred to as the combined model (see Figure 4) is perhaps the strongest is the prediction of social be-havior from global dispositional variables. In this regard, the trait-behavior and the attitude-behavior relations have recently been explicitly approached from the moderator-variable per-spective. For example, the predictive efficacy of both traits and attitudes have improved when self-monitoring (Snyder, 1983) and self-consciousness (Scheier, 1980), respectively, have been used as moderator variables. Moreover, investigators such as Snyder and Ickes (1985) and Sherman and Fazio (1983, p. 327) have asked the following questions: By what process or pro-cesses do attitudes toward an object affect behavior toward the object? Likewise, what conceivable processes link traits to be-havior? What such suggestions lack is precisely the kind of unified conceptual and analytic framework presented in our combined moderator-mediator example (see Figure 4). By using such a path analytic framework, one could take a variable such as differences in self-monitoring orientation and simultaneously establish both its role as a moderator and the nature of the me-diation process through which it has an impact on a given class of behavior. At an operational level, such a strategy compels one to go beyond merely measuring differences in self-monitoring (the moderator paths) to operationalizing a mediator mecha-nism, for example, providing some measure of differential at-tention or variables in impression management. Further, placing both moderator and mediator variables within the same causal system helps to make salient the more
dynamic role played by mediators as opposed to moderators (Finney, Mitchell, Cronkite, Moos, 1984). Specifically, intro-ducing a moderator variable merely involves a relatively static classification procedure. For example, self-monitoring as a moderator sets up a partition of people holding a given personal-ity trait into subgroups of those more or less likely to translate their psychological dispositions into overt actions; that is, the emphasis is on who does what. On the other hand, linking the Self-Monitoring x Trait relation to a specific mediating mecha-nism implies that variations in self-monitoring elicit or insti-gate different patterns of coping or information processing that cause people to become more or less consistent with their atti-tudes in their behavior. Here the prior condition allows us to discover different states that cause individuals to act differently—a more dynamic conception of how third variables op-erate.