Pre-Ratings of Conditioned Stimuli as a Potential Source of Bias in Evaluative Conditioning

09:00 - 10:30

From Context to Cognition: Factors Shaping Evaluative Conditioning

Room: HSZ - N2

Chair/s:

Claudine Pulm, Florian Weber

Evaluative Conditioning (EC) refers to changes in attitude towards a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its pairing with a positive or negative unconditioned stimulus (US). In this symposium, we discuss various context-related and cognitive factors that may influence EC effects and shape the resulting conditioned attitudes. The first talk will explore whether letting participants rate a CS both before and after conditioning - rather than only afterward - impacts EC effects. The second talk centers around valence asymmetries resulting from differences in the frequency of positive and negative USs during EC. Whereas prior research has focused on valence asymmetries for individual stimuli, this talk extends the analysis to groups, demonstrating that rare group members can disproportionately affect overall group evaluations. Focusing on instances of EC with multiple, simultaneously appearing USs, the third talk presents evidence that adding weakly positive (negative) USs to a highly positive (negative) US diminishes EC effects. The fourth talk investigates the role of language for the conditioning process, testing whether a native vs. a secondary language context during EC leads to different outcomes. The last talk examines autonomous sampling during EC, asking whether merely instructing participants to sample certain stimuli more frequently is sufficient to achieve the effect that autonomous sampling has on conditioned attitudes. In summary, these talks offer valuable insights into how contextual and cognitive processes shape EC effects, enhancing our understanding of EC and highlighting promising directions for future research.

Submission 329

Pre-Ratings of Conditioned Stimuli as a Potential Source of Bias in Evaluative Conditioning

SymposiumTalk-01

Presented by: Claudine Pulm

Claudine Pulm ¹, Anne Gast ¹, Lea Sperlich ¹, Olivier Corneille ^{1, 2}

¹ University of Cologne, Germany

² Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium

Evaluative conditioning (EC) research deals with the question of how we form attitudes toward conditioned stimuli (CSs) by pairing them with positive or negative unconditioned stimuli. In the present study (N = 296), we experimentally investigated whether measuring the attitude toward the CSs before conditioning influences the EC effect. We reasoned that assessing participants’ attitudes before conditioning might signal the importance of this judgment (e.g., through conversational norms/experimental demands) and thereby bias subsequent evaluations. Participants either rated their liking of the CSs both before and after conditioning or only after conditioning. Results showed an EC effect and, more importantly, that the magnitude of the EC effect did not differ between groups. These findings suggest that pre-ratings of CSs do not systematically inflate or deflate conditioned attitudes in EC paradigms.

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