engleski

Is there a construct within a person without the person's competence?

Theory and research (i.e. Wicklund, Braun, and Waibel, 1994) suggest that people, when incompetent in a certain area, strive towards coherency contained in the traits or physical aspects assigned to experts in those areas. Research (Wicklund and Škreblin, 2004) also shows that when encountering a new concept or formula for doing something, and not having involvement with it, people tend to create consistencies among components of their own orientations vis-&agrave ; -vis the concept. An experiment was designed to examine the idea that incompetence regarding an exotic food, will lead to trying to be more cognitively consistent when evaluating that food. Another objective was to examine how reliably would subjects relate different aspects of evaluation to behavioral intention and to actual performance. There were 64 students (22 males and 42 females) of the University of Trieste participating in the experiment. Subjects in the Active condition were offered the chance to taste an exotic sweet, while Passive participants could only see the sweet without tasting it. Then, participants’ evaluations of the outer and inner qualities of the sweet and their intention to eat it in the future were measured with a questionnaire. Observed eating behavior at the time participants thought the experiment was over was used as a measure of overt behavior. Correlations between attitudinal elements regarding the sweet were higher for the incompetent subjects, confirming that a lack of experience leads to a person’ s creating strong coherencies among the cognitive aspects of that same area. Further, as resulting from t-test analyses, the evaluative basis of one’ s behavioral intention was the same as the evaluative basis of one’ s behavior only for the competent participants, showing that incompetence also implies an inability to understand the evaluative bases of one’ s actual behavior. Results are discussed in the context of Campbell and Fiske’ s (1959) notion that holding a psychological construct is best evidenced by the emergence of modest correlations among the indicators of the concept.

attitude; competence; consistency

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