Attitudinal, normative and affective components of decisionmaking: Further research on multicomponent decision models

Previous research demonstrated that judgments of intent were significantly related to attitudinal, normative and (global) affective components of decisionmaking. The research failed, however, to demonstrate the distinctiveness of the three components by obtaining convergent and discriminant validity measures. The authors’ study addressed this limitation. Multiple methods were used to measure each of the three components. A convergent and discriminant analysis indicated that the three components represented different constructs. In addition, the study replicated the previous findings that (a) the affective component was the best single-component predictor of intent, and (b) neither an equally nor differentially weighted two- or three-component additive model, regardless of the method used to predict it, had a significantly higher hit rate than the affective component alone. Four hypotheses are proposed for explaining the latter results and guiding future research.