Attitude and Behavior (Ed Batista)

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We often assume that our attitude drives our behavior, and that we act as we do because of underlying thoughts and feelings. This way of understanding ourselves can pose a challenge when we perceive a conflict between the activities necessary to realize our goals and the thoughts or emotions associated with those activities at a given moment. We may conclude that our state of mind prevents us from engaging in desirable behaviors (or compels us to engage in undesirable behaviors), and as a consequence we feel like prisoners of our own psychology.

We're unhappy, so we sink into lassitude and indulge our sorrows. We're demotivated, so we work halfheartedly or don't work at all. We're annoyed or angry with someone, so we avoid them--or we stumble into a confrontation. We know we should act differently, but we don't feel like it--and our common beliefs regarding the causal relationship between attitude and behavior put the former firmly in control of the latter.

This isn't an entirely inaccurate picture. One of the most important functions of emotion is to interrupt conscious thought and orient us toward potential threats and opportunities, as the late psychologist Daniel Wegner noted:

It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead... Emotions are built in by evolution, not to be tampered with, because hundreds of generations of humans before us have survived their friends or acquaintances who were able to shut down their emotions. Disgust keeps us from eating icky things; sadness helps us notice our losses; fear reminds us to run from predators; joy keeps us coming back to our friends and sex partners. It is good, in other words, that when we feel an emotional state, our normal purposes and interests succumb to an influence beyond our control. The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality. [1]

As a result, emotions are attention magnets [2], which alternately attract and repel us, and this elegant system, the result of millions of years of evolution, is a "feature" of human psychology, not a "bug." [3] This is consistent with what neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio have learned in recent decades about the role emotions play in logical reasoning. Rather than acting antagonistically, emotion and reason usually work together in concert to enable us to make good decisions and navigate the world successfully. [4] Usually--but not always.

The challenge is that emotions are a "quick and dirty" signal, in the words of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux [5], which allow us to process vast amounts of information rapidly, but at the cost of occasional accuracy. Although "the priority of emotions over will" is necessary in order for us "to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality," in most instances our interpretation of "reality" is highly contingent and subject to any number of biases and distortions. [6] As noted above, we know we should act differently, but we don't feel like it--and at these times the power of our emotions may not serve us well. So what can we do?

We can start by replacing the simplistic framework above with a more complex view of human psychology. Rather than being a one-way causal relationship, it's a two-way street: While our attitude obviously informs and influences our behavior, our behavior also informs and influences our thoughts and feelings in a dynamic and cyclical process:

Psychologists and neuroscientists have struggled to determine the precise mechanisms by which this process occurs, [7] and there are limits to its efficacy. We can't simply will ourselves out of profound dysfunction caused by clinical depression, anxiety or trauma. But we do have much more power than we typically realize to consciously choose behaviors that will affect our attitude and influence the everyday emotions that can get in the way of our goals and objectives. And while science can't yet (and may never) identify the ways in which specific behaviors alter specific attitudes across the population at large, we can still apply the general principle and craft a set of experiments to best meet our individual needs.

An important element in this process is known as cognitive dissonance: When our attitude and our behavior are inconsistent, we experience discomfort and even distress, and we modify either our attitude or our behavior to reduce the inconsistency. The original research on the subject was conducted by Leon Festinger, who noted that "cognitive dissonance is a motivating state of affairs. Just as hunger impels a person to eat, so does dissonance impel a person to change his opinions or his behavior." [8]

So despite the power of our emotions, we need not allow our initial attitude to dictate our behavior. Instead we can leverage the power of cognitive dissonance by choosing to act differently, which in turn can shift our attitude. As Ignatius of Loyola put it nearly 500 years ago, "Perform the acts of faith, and faith will come." [9]

More recent research has helped us learn more about how this process works in the brain, with one team of neuroscientists concluding that people who behave in ways that are in conflict with their attitudes "change their attitudes to be more consistent with the counter-attitudinal behavior. Dissonance has been shown to be a negative emotional state accompanied by autonomic arousal; it has been shown that people change their attitudes and restore consonance to specifically reduce the negative affect." [10]

What does this look like in practice? While we can draw upon research from psychology and neuroscience, the limitations of this research require us to actively experiment in order to discover the specific behaviors that effectively alter specific attitudes for each of us as individuals. For example, the issues noted above occur commonly in my work with senior leaders--unhappiness and demotivation result in disengagement, or annoyance and anger result in avoidance or conflict--so I often talk with clients about experiments that involve the following:

Engaging in a range of "happiness strategies," small-scale intentional activities that can improve our sense of subjective well-being.
Committing to exercise routines, a mindfulness practice, and good sleep hygiene, all of which can enhance our capacity for emotion regulation and in some cases directly alter our moods.
Actively journaling and talking about our emotions.

But the precise nature of these activities can vary tremendously from one individual to the next, and figuring all this out takes work--and we're not always willing to invest the effort. All too often we want to be told what to do--we want a shortcut. I frequently see this response in students who are looking for universal laws derived from research--I have to remind them that as human beings they're far too complex to be accurately represented by any model, no matter how sound. [11] There are no algorithms, only heuristics.

Compounding the challenge, not only are our emotions not subject to willful control (a good thing, as Wegner reminds us), but a predictable set of problems are triggered when we seek to influence how we feel by deliberately engaging in desired behaviors (or refraining from undesired behaviors):

It feels taxing. We have two distinct ways of thinking, known as System 1 and System 2, [12] and psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes the former as operating "automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control," while the latter "allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it... The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration." [13] System 2 thinking is a finite mental resource, so we've evolved to experience it as taxing and fatiguing, which motivates us to preserve it for truly important activities. Efforts to direct our attention toward (or away from) certain activities or objectives consume System 2 processing, which is why this conceptually simple task can feel surprisingly difficult. There's no easy solution here, but a mindfulness practice can provide a "workout in attention management."

It feels phony. Deliberately engaging in behaviors intended to alter our attitude can evoke a sense of inauthenticity or can lead others to experience us as insincere, which runs counter to the emphasis contemporary culture places on "being yourself." To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we should suppress difficult emotions--but emotion regulation is not the same thing as suppression, and we make a serious error when we define "authenticity" as "ease." Author Brené Brown is often viewed as a champion of authenticity, but she rejects the idea that this means simply "being yourself": "Authenticity requires almost constant vigilance and awareness about the connections between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It also means staying mindful about our intentions. Real authenticity actually requires major self-monitoring..." [14] Active efforts to influence our attitude compel us to observe ourselves closely (or "self-monitor") and to experiment with new behaviors until they become integrated into our repertoires.

It feels forced. When this process feels taxing we can build up our psychological stamina, and when it feels phony we can reframe our understanding of authenticity--but it's essential to enter into the experience willingly, with a sense of agency and choice, rather than as a duty or obligation. The neuroscience research cited above notes that when people "attribute their counter-attitudinal behavior to payment or coercion...conflict between behavior and prior attitudes is reduced, and [they] experience less cognitive dissonance and do not change their attitudes." [15] We can't compel a change in attitude--we can only invite it by establishing psychological safety, by creating the right conditions, and by treating ourselves with compassion.

Footnotes

[1] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123 (Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)

[2] To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions (Harvard Business Review, 2015)

[3] "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature" Trite--or Just Right? (Nicholas Carr, Wired, 2018)

[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[5] The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, page 163 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)

[6] When Heuristics Go Bad

[7] For example, an influential study suggested that the act of smiling could stimulate feelings of happiness, but these findings later failed to replicate, and yet it now appears that the failure may have been the result of changes in the experimental conditions. The initial work on "power posing," which suggested that altering one's physical stance could induce heightened feelings of confidence, also failed to replicate, and it does appear that there were substantial flaws in the original research. However, the "power pose" researchers also highlighted problems with the replication efforts, although one of them subsequently retracted her support for the concept. While the ongoing "replication crisis" should give us ample pause before we take any single study at face value, I don't believe it renders social science invalid, and it's up to us to be more thoughtful consumers of research as we put it into practice. (Further thoughts on this here.)

[8] "Cognitive Dissonance" (Leon Festinger, Scientific American, October 1962, pages 93-94)

[9] Cited in From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, page 39 (Jacques Barzun, 2001)

[10] Neural activity predicts attitude change in cognitive dissonance (Vincent van Veen, Marie Krug, Jonathan Schooler and Cameron Carter, Nature Neuroscience, 2009)

[11] The Map Is Not the Territory

[12] Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? (Keith Stanovich and Richard West, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 5, October 2000)

[13] Thinking, Fast and Slow, pages 20-21 (Daniel Kahneman, 2013)

[14] My response to Adam Grant’s New York Times Op/Ed (Brené Brown, LinkedIn, June 5, 2016)

[15] Van Veen, et al.

For Further Reading

Lyubomirsky's Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic