Campbell paradigm
The paradigm was developed by social psychologist Florian G. Kaiser and his colleagues, Katarzyna Byrka and Terry Hartig, in 2010,[1] building on an earlier suggestion by Donald T. Campbell,[2] after whom the paradigm is named.
It is mainly (but not exclusive) applied to behaviors that are aimed at fighting climate change and protecting the environment.
[1] The Campbell paradigm suggests that behavior (e.g., switching off lights when leaving a room) is typically the result of two factors: a person's commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment (i.e., a person's environmental attitude) and the costs that come with a specific behavior (e.g., having to remember to switch off the lights; see Fig.
The Campbell paradigm is based on the controversial assumption that attitude and behavior are genuinely consistent.
Thus, they adopted the Rasch model as a less rigid depiction of the paradigm (see the formula and its explanation).
: e.g., his or her environmental attitude) minus all the financial and figurative costs that come with switching off lights (
[7] This account of why and when behavior occurs also serves as the theoretical basis for the measurement of individual attitudes.
[4] To illustrate: Someone with a pronounced preference for music by Taylor Swift (i.e., a person with a strong, positive attitude toward Taylor Swift's music) will generally put forth considerable effort and spend large amounts of money to attend a concert by her.
By contrast, people with less of a commitment to Taylor Swift's music will attend a concert only if given a ticket as a gift.
On the one hand, this example shows that people can engage in different behaviors to express a more or less strong commitment to/preference for Taylor Swift's music (e.g., attend a concert, listen to a song when it is played on the radio).
Consequently, the costs that someone bears and, thus, the behaviors that someone will engage in to attain the attitudinal goal, can be used to determine people's attitude levels.
[18][19][20] This classical view of attitude as a personal reason is of course ultimately justified only when one is able to reliably and consistently anticipate manifest behavior with an attitude measure,[7] that is, if the notorious attitude-behavior gap does not really exist.
[21][22][23][24] The Campbell paradigm's explanation of behavior is extremely parsimonious as can be concluded from the Rasch model.
The question that remains is “for whom?” The literature contains a considerable number of (sometimes contradictory) conjunctive behavioral explanations[29] that speak of the cost-moderated efficacy of people's attitudes (see Fig.
[34] This countervailing relationship between behavioral costs and attitude has been repeatedly quasi-experimentally confirmed in environmental protection research.
[38] However, Kaiser and colleagues have argued that any form of circularity can be comparatively easily avoided.
[4] When individual differences in people's attitude (e.g., in environmental attitude) are derived from verbal behaviors expressed in questionnaires (i.e., opinions, e.g., "protecting the environment is important"; appraisals, e.g., "I regret not doing more to combat climate change"; and claims of engaging in a behavior, e.g., "I recycle paper"), it is by no means trivial to use the correspondingly derived attitudinal differences to predict whether people will actually eat vegetarian lunches.
Circularity can thus be avoided if the indicators (i.e., the manifestations used to derive individual levels of an attitude) and the consequences of the attitude (e.g., its manifest effects, the criteria to be explained) are logically and practically distinct.
As consequences of people's attitude, one can then employ real behavior (e.g., the manifest choice of a vegetarian lunch)[34] or objectively measurable traces of behavior (e.g., the amount of electricity a person consumes annually).
