In a working environment like Bangalore there are people who come from all parts of the country. Let us assume for the time being that you come from a part of the country where there is a negative attitude held in the society towards women and the prevailing attitude is that women wouldn’t be in positions of power. If as a new employee an organization, you are supposed to report to a female supervisor; the inconsistency in the behavior with your attitude and cultural belief becomes clearly visible. Thus we see that the social context is an important provider of information that would define the outcome of the relation between acceptable attitudes and behavior.
We have already learnt about self-monitoring in an earlier byte. The people who are low self-monitors relay on their internal states to make decision about behavior, while the high self-monitors are extremely responsive to the situational cues. Given the versatile nature of the people who are high self-monitors, there would be a lower degree of predictability of behavior from the attitude that is held, compared to those who are low self-monitors.
Timing of the measurement also affects attitude-behavior correspondence. If the time is shorter between the attitude measurement and the observed behavior, the relationship would be stronger. This is exactly the benefit that the surveys before the actual voting reap on.