| Summary: | Researchers in marketing have concluded that behavior intentions are not a very good predictor of behavior. It has been suggested that unexpected situations may be causing much of the inconsistency between intentions and behavior. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which unexpected situations affect behavior intention - behavior inconsistency. Fifty seven housholds from Tucson, Arizona were studied. For each household, information concerning intended consumption of fifteen foods and beverages was collected. This information included: attitudes toward the foods, social norm effects, past behavior, and intended consumption over the next seven days. In addition, the expectation of thirteen situations occurring and their expected influence on consumption was measured. Seven days later, the subjects were asked to report their actual consumption of the fifteen food products and the actual occurrence and influence of the thirteen situations. In addition to self-reports, garbage analysis was used to measure past behavior and consumption during the seven day experimental period. Correlation and regression analyses were used to assess the extent to which unexpected situations influenced the inconsistency in behavior. The results indicated that unexpected situations do explain some of the inconsistency between intentions and behavior. Unexpected situations explained an average (across products) of between 5.8% and 14.1%, and as much as 53.5% of the variance in behavior inconsistency. However, the influence of situational variables was quite different for each product. In addition, it was found that the amount of inconsistency explained by the situational variables. An interesting findings was that the simple unexpected occurrence or nonoccurrence of a situation also exlained behavior inconsistency, indicating subjective effects of situations are not required to explain behavior. These results have several important implications. First, objectively based measures of situations can be used to explain some types of consumer behavior. This makes situational variables much easier for managers to monitor and control. Situational variables were also found to have generalizable effects across individuals, again indicating that situational variables may be easier for managers to use than was previously supposed. Finally, this research indicates that it would be useful to include situational variables into behavior intentions models, especially when intentions and behavior are not closely related.
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