Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1986, Vol. 31, No. 3, 505-514

Copyright 1986 hy the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-35l4/86/$00.75

Attitude Accessibility as a Moderator of the Attitude-Perception and Attitude-Behavior Relations: An Investigation of the 1984 Presidential Election
Russell H. Fazio and Carol J. Williams Indiana University
It was hypothesized that the extent to which individuals' attitudes guide their subsequent perceptions of and behavior toward the attitude object is a function of the accessibility of those attitudes from memory. A field investigation concerning the 1984 presidential election was conducted as a test of these hypotheses. Attitudes toward each of the two candidates, Reagan and Mondale, and the accessibility of those attitudes, as indicated by the latency of response to the attitudinal inquiry, were measured for a large sample of townspeople months before the election. Judgments of the performance of the candidates during the televised debates served as the measure of subsequent perceptions, and voting served as the measure of subsequent behavior. As predicted, both the attitude-perception and the attitude-behavior relations were moderated by attitude accessibility. The implications of these findings for theoretical models of the processes by which attitudes guide behavior, along with their practical implications for survey research, are discussed.

Research on the consistency between individuals' attitudes and behavior toward an object has focused on the identification of variables that moderate the extent of the observed relation. This approach, which has been referred to as the W//je«.?generation of research due to its focus on the issue of when attitude scores are predictive of later behavior (Zanna & Fazio, 1982), has produced considerable progress. A variety of situational variables, personality