The DOI matches its Crossref record; 77 of the 77 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy
Abstract
This article examines the methodological implications of the fact that what people say is often a poor predictor of what they do. We argue that many interview and survey researchers routinely conflate self-reports with behavior and assume a consistency between attitudes and action. We call this erroneous inference of situated behavior from verbal accounts the attitudinal fallacy. Though interviewing and ethnography are often lumped together as “qualitative methods,” by juxtaposing studies of “culture in action” based on verbal accounts with ethnographic investigations, we show that the latter routinely attempts to explain the “attitude–behavior problem” while the former regularly ignores it. Because meaning and action are collectively negotiated and context-dependent, we contend that self-reports of attitudes and behaviors are of limited value in explaining what people actually do because they are overly individualistic and abstracted from lived experience.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
(1984) · Cited by 21,166
Wallace, A. F. C., & Garfinkel, H. (1968) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2092245 · Cited by 12,445
Mind, Self, and Society: The Definitive Edition
Mead, G. H., Joas, H., Huebner, D. R., & Morris, C. W. (2015) · University of Chicago Press eBooks · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226112879.001.0001 · Cited by 11,018
Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies
Swidler, A. (1986) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2095521 · Cited by 8,661
Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/231294 · Cited by 6,165
The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences
Lamont, M., & Molnár, V. (2002) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141107 · Cited by 5,059
The Structure of Social Action
Rauber, E. L., & Parsons, T. (1938) · Southern Economic Journal · doi:10.2307/1052455 · Cited by 3,934
Busfield, J., & Garfinkel, H. (1968) · The British Journal of Sociology · doi:10.2307/588840 · Cited by 3,813
Manifesto for a Relational Sociology
Emirbayer, M. (1997) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/231209 · Cited by 3,791
DiMaggio, P. (1997) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.23.1.263 · Cited by 3,161
Cited by
Flexible Coding of In-depth Interviews: A Twenty-first-century Approach
Deterding, N. M., & Waters, M. C. (2021) · Sociological Methods & Research · doi:10.1177/0049124118799377 · Cited by 1,626
Lizardo, O. (2017) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/0003122416675175 · Cited by 507
Algorithms in practice: Comparing web journalism and criminal justice
Christin, A. (2017) · Big Data & Society · doi:10.1177/2053951717718855 · Cited by 379
Miller, R. J. (2014) · Punishment & Society · doi:10.1177/1462474514527487 · Cited by 294
Counting Clicks: Quantification and Variation in Web Journalism in the United States and France
Christin, A. (2018) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/696137 · Cited by 266
Metadata
- Authors
- Jerolmack, C., & Khan, S.
- Venue
- Sociological Methods & Research
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-03-09
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 178-209
- ISSN
- 0049-1241 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-8294
- OpenAlex
- W2006269938
- Cited by
- 817
- References
- 77
- FWCI
- 142.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0049124114523396
- The paper
- Jerolmack, C., & Khan, S. (2014). Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy. Sociological Methods & Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124114523396
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
