Evaluative Conditioning Beyond CS-US Pairings: How People Integrate Multiple Affective Stimuli Into Conditioned Attitudes

• Applicants: Dr. Moritz Ingendahl; Professor Dr. Tobias Vogel
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 529668264

People change their attitudes towards people and objects based on their mere co-occurrence with positive/negative stimuli, a phenomenon termed evaluative conditioning (EC). EC is a robust and well-studied phenomenon in social psychology. Despite that, EC research has so far focused primarily on the simple case where a person or object co-occurs with a single positive/negative stimulus in a situation. However, stimulus pairings in the social environment are arguably more complex and often involve more than one affective stimulus. How does EC work if there is more than one positive/negative stimulus? This has not been adressed in previous EC theories. In this proposal, we sketch a new theoretical framework to study EC with multiple affective stimuli. Based on earlier research on information integration and negativity biases, we propose two distinct types of information integration in EC – summation and averaging. Four preliminary experiments show evidence for an averaging rule underlying conditioned attitudes, where negative stimuli receive a stronger weight. This weighted averaging bears two core implications for EC: First, EC is non-monotonous, such that a larger number of positive/negative stimuli does not lead to more positive/negative conditioned attitudes. Second, EC effects are interdependent, such that the effect of one positive/negative stimulus on the conditioned attitude is strongest if there is no other stimulus, weaker if there is another positive stimulus, and weakest if another stimulus is negative. We propose a research agenda of 13 experiments serving four primary goals: First, we systematically test the generalizability and boundary conditions of the weighted averaging rule in EC. Second, we identify the cognitive processes underlying information integration, specifically whether the information is integrated during learning or when making an evaluative judgment. Third, we propose a distinction between propositional and associative processes in the underlying information integration rule. Last, we dissociate between attitude valence and attitude strength regarding the information integration rule.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Hans Alves