Evaluative conditioning is often assumed to underlie many of the attitudes that play a role in our everyday lives. Evaluative conditioning consists of a change in valence that is due to pairings of a neutral stimulus (for example a person or a product) with a positive or negative stimulus (for example a likeable or dislikeable person, a negative news report, or an attractive landscape). Because such stimuli regularly occur in people's lives, one might argue that people might change their attitudes due to evaluative conditioning on a regular basis. On the other hand, such a general mechanism might not be adaptive. Based on a Declarative Memory of evaluative conditioning (Gast, 2018), we argue that people need to retrieve the relevant stimulus pairings for an EC effect to occur. This in turn requires sufficient attention when observing the relevant stimuli (CS and US). While in lab studies attention to these stimuli is usually high, this is not necessarily the case if the stimuli occur in the background of people's everyday activities. In this project we therefore test evaluative conditioning in a specific everyday context and with relatively unobtrusive presentation of CS-US-pairings.

I will present results from six studies in which we presented picture-picture pairings to students during university lectures. Results from these studies suggest that evaluative conditioning effects in such a setting might be scarce. It might play a role how salient the stimuli are. I will discuss some implications of these studies.