Attribute Conditioning (AC) refers to people’s changed assessments of stimuli’s (CSs) attributes due to repeated pairing with stimuli (USs) possessing these attributes; for example, when an athletic person (US) is paired with a neutral person (CS), the neutral person is judged to be more athletic after the pairing. We hypothesize that this AC effect is due to CSs’ associations with USs rather than direct associations with attributes. Three experiments test this hypothesis by changing US attributes after CS-US pairings. Experiments 1 and 2 conditioned athleticism by pairing neutral men (CSs) with athletic and non-athletic USs. Post-conditioning, USs’ athleticism was reversed, which systematically influenced participants’ assessment of CS athleticism. Experiment 3 conditioned athleticism and changed USs’ musicality after CS-US pairings. This post-conditioning change affected musicality assessments of CSs but did not influence athleticism-assessments. The results indicate that AC effects are based on an associative CS-US-attribute structure.
BaeyensF.EelenP.Van den BerghO.CrombezG. (1992). The content of learning in human evaluative conditioning: Acquired valence is sensitive to US-revaluation. Learning and Motivation, 23, 200-224.
2.
Bar-AnanY.De HouwerJ.NosekB. A. (2010). Evaluative conditioning and conscious knowledge of contingencies: A correlational investigation with large samples. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 2313-2335.
3.
Bar-AnanY.NosekB. A. (2012). Reporting intentional rating of the primes predicts priming effects in the affective misattribution procedure. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 1194-1208.
4.
BazińskaR.WojciszkeB. (1996). Drawing inferences on moral and competence-related traits from the same behavioural information. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 27, 293-299.
5.
BrownR. D.BassiliJ. N. (2002). Spontaneous trait associations and the case of the superstitious banana. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 87-92.
6.
CarlstonD. E.SkowronskiJ. J. (2005). Linking versus thinking: Evidence for the different associative and attributional bases of spontaneous trait transference and spontaneous trait inference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 884-898.
7.
CrawfordM. T.SkowronskiJ. J.StiffC.SchererC. R. (2007). Interfering with inferential, but not associative, processes underlying spontaneous trait inference. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 677-690.
8.
De HouwerJ. (2009). The propositional approach to associative learning as an alternative for association formation models. Learning & Behavior, 37, 1-20.
9.
FestingerL. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
10.
FiedlerK.UnkelbachC. (2011). Evaluative conditioning depends on higher order encoding processes. Cognition and Emotion, 25, 639-656.
11.
FiedlerK.UnkelbachC. (2014). Regressive judgment: Implications of a universal property of the empirical world. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 361-367.
12.
FördererS.UnkelbachC. (2011). Beyond evaluative conditioning! Evidence for transfer of non-evaluative attributes. Social Psychology and Personality Science, 2, 479-486.
13.
FördererS.UnkelbachC. (2012). Hating the cute kitten or loving the aggressive pit-bull: EC effects depend on CS-US relations. Cognition and Emotion, 26, 534-540.
14.
FördererS.UnkelbachC. (2013). On the stability of evaluative conditioning effects: The role of identity memory, valence memory, and evaluative consolidation. Social Psychology, 44, 380-389.
15.
FördererS.UnkelbachC. (2014). The moderating role of attribute accessibility in conditioning multiple specific attributes. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 69-81. doi:10.1002/ejsp.1994
16.
FördererS.UnkelbachC. (2015). Attribute conditioning: Changing attribute-assessments through mere pairings. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68, 144-164.
17.
GalliM.GornG. (2011). Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21, 215-225.
18.
GawronskiB.BodenhausenG. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 692-731.
19.
HastieR.ParkB. (1986). The relationship between memory and judgment depends on whether the judgment task is memory-based or on-line. Psychological Review, 93, 258-268.
20.
HeiderF. F. (1946). Attitudes and cognitive organization. Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, 21, 107-112.
21.
HütterM.SweldensS. (2013). Implicit misattribution of evaluative responses: Contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning requires simultaneous stimulus presentations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142, 638-643.
22.
HütterM.SweldensS.StahlC.UnkelbachC.KlauerK. C. (2012). Dissociating contingency awareness and conditioned attitudes: Evidence of contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141, 539-557.
23.
ImhoffR.SchmidtA. F.BernhardtJ.DierksmeierA.BanseR. (2011). An inkblot for sexual preference: A semantic variant of the affect misattribution procedure. Cognition and Emotion, 25, 676-690.
24.
KimJ.AllenC. T.KardesF. R. (1996). An investigation of the mediational mechanisms underlying attitudinal conditioning. Journal of Marketing Research, 33, 318-328.
25.
MackintoshN. J. (1983). Conditioning and associative learning. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
26.
MeersmansT.De HouwerJ.BaeyensF.RandellT.EelenP. (2005). Beyond evaluative conditioning? Searching for associative transfer of nonevaluative stimulus properties. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 283-306.
27.
OlsonM.KendrickR.FazioR. (2009). Implicit learning of evaluative vs. Non-evaluative covariations: The role of dimension accessibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 398-403.
28.
PayneB.Brown-IannuzziJ.BurkleyM.ArbuckleN. L.CooleyE.CameronC.LundbergK. B. (2013). Intention invention and the affect misattribution procedure: Reply to Bar-Anan and Nosek (2012). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39, 375-386.
29.
ShanksD. R. (2007). Associationism and cognition: Human contingency learning at 25. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 291-309.
30.
ShanksD. R. (2010). Learning: From association to cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 273-301.
31.
SkowronskiJ. J.CarlstonD. E.MaeL.CrawfordM. T. (1998). Spontaneous trait transference: Communicators take on the qualities they describe in others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 837-848.
32.
StahlC.UnkelbachC. (2009). Evaluative learning with single versus multiple unconditioned stimuli: The role of contingency awareness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 35, 286-291.
33.
StahlC.UnkelbachC.CorneilleO. (2009). On the respective contributions of awareness of unconditioned stimulus valence and unconditioned stimulus identity in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 404-420.
34.
SweldensS.CorneilleO.YzerbytV. (2014). The role of awareness in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18, 187-209.
35.
SweldensS.Van OsselaerS. J.JaniszewskiC. (2010). Evaluative conditioning procedures and the resilience of conditioned brand attitudes. Journal of Consumer Research, 37, 473-489.
36.
TodorovA.SaidC. P.EngelA. D.OosterhofN. N. (2008). Understanding evaluation of faces on social dimensions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 455-460.
37.
UlemanJ. S. (1987). Consciousness and control: The case of spontaneous trait inferences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 13, 337-354.
38.
WaltherE.GawronskiB.BlankH.LangerT. (2009). Changing likes and dislikes through the backdoor: The US-revaluation effect. Cognition and Emotion, 23, 889-917.
39.
WaltherE.NagengastB.TrasselliC. (2005). Evaluative conditioning in social psychology: Facts and speculations. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 175-196.
40.
WillisJ.TodorovA. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after 100 ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17, 592-598.
41.
WinterL.UlemanJ. S. (1984). When are social judgments made? Evidence for the spontaneousness of trait inferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 237-252.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
