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Attitudes ProSem Week 2/5
Comments/Questions
First, some historical reading, if you’re so inclined: Bob Zajonc http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2009/april-09/memories-ofrobert-b-zajonc.html
Questions:
Chris Mellinger
1. It seems like Gawronski et al. and Jones et al. are tackling different stages of attitude formation,
even though they are both studying the way in which evaluative information is “attached” to or
integrated with a stimulus representation. One interesting thing about both of these papers is
that they are relevant to the question of when and how information gaps are filled in. EC shows
that evaluation occurs based on very subtle manipulations of situational valence. The context
manipulation in Gawronski et al. is interesting in that it tries to illuminate one way in which
conflicting valence information is dealt with. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel to me like the
background color of a face image is a particularly ecological context. It’s good to know that
situational factors are important (background color or proximal objects), but I’m curious about
how both of these might extend to more realistic contexts.
2. It seemed to me (correct me if I’m wrong) that the consensus last week was that attitudes are
more related to representations (always valenced), where evaluations are measurements
extracted from (or based on) those representations. If that’s true, then it seems like attitude
formation is basically the construction of representation. This assumption certainly seems to
underlie the empirical research we read this week. The account of renewal and occasion setting
is explicitly representational. The misattribution explanation of EC also seems to hint at
representation, at least in the operationalization of evaluation (direct comparison of
conditioned stimuli). One of the things that I hope attitude research does for us is to understand
the effects of social category membership in attitude formation, both in terms of forming
attitudes toward categories and in forming attitudes toward individuals who are members of
categories. The research here is ongoing, but I’d love to hear thoughts on the role of categories
in forming representations of exemplars. If I learn information about an exemplar, and then
learn that s/he is a member of a category, which information wins? It seems that categories are
tools for quickly and efficiently enriching a representation of an object, but individualized
information can be in conflict with category representations: then what? To some extent these
are empirical issues, but it might be fun to think about.
3. Is evaluation always driven by affect? When does one occur independently of the other, if ever?
Zajonc tries to distinguish between feeling and thinking systems. The other authors avoid the
debate, however their results are dependent on some kind of evaluation. Clearly, some
evaluations can be more motivational than others, but I’m curious to know what others think of
the idea that some evaluations might be relatively free of motivation/affect. Perhaps motivation
is dependent on context, or the personal relevance of the object under consideration.
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4. Maybe more interestingly, different evaluations can have dramatically different motivational
implications. In the social neuroscience class, we had a discussion concerning evidence that
social exclusion provokes a pattern of neural activation that resembles the neural “pain
signature.” However, pain and social exclusion have dramatically different response
implications; pain motivates us to avoid, but social exclusion motivates at least some approach.
Thus, in addition to relatively different motivational strength, it seems like evaluations can also
carry qualitatively different motivational content. (I acknowledge that in situations of social
exclusion the target of evaluation is far more ambiguous, but at least in some cases the
argument could be made that it is the excluder; in this case, I think the question stands).
Sharaya Jones
1) Jones et al (2009) ~ Evaluative conditioning occurs when an object is paired with a positively
or negatively valence stimuli. Supposedly this change in attitudes can occur as a result of mere
association, which suggests that attitudes can change without cognition. Zajonc (1980), similarly
notes that affect does not require cognition, such that we can like something and not
necessarily know why. Jones et al. attempt to show through eye tracking that evaluative
conditioning occurs more often when there is source confusion. How valid is the length of an
individual’s gaze in explaining attitude shifts? Do these findings actually show attitude
development, or do they simply show increased recognition? Are recognition and attitudes
different? Without any measure of valence or affect, how can we call this behavior ‘attitude
change’ or ‘attitude development’?
2) Zajonc (1980) discusses the role of affect in attitudes and notes that additional information
does not change attitudes, because the induced affect remains, despite the addition of new
information. Gawronski et al (2010), on the other hand, look to find what happens when
individuals are exposed to information that is incongruent with the initially acquired
information. In such situations, individuals search for contextual factors that might explain this
discrepancy. The authors note that they do not use a direct measure for attention, which is a
critical mediator. Depending on the weighting an individual gives to one piece of information
over another could drastically impact an individual’s attitude change, or lack there of.
3) Zajonc (1980) discusses recognition and notes that affective reactions to a stimulus can be
acquired by virtue of experience with that stimulus (similar to Jones et al). Extrapolating on this,
repeatedly doing something might cause you to develop an attitude towards it. Further, Zajonc
discusses the primacy of impression. If an initial response is negative, will additional experience
with the stimulus enhance the negative attitude (by reinforcing it) or is there a possibility that
familiarity with the stimulus will dim the initial negative response? Further, can you force
yourself to like something by doing it over and over again?
Brianne Eby
1. On page 154, Zajonc says, “…it is entirely possible that the very first stage of the organism’s
reaction to stimuli and the very first elements in retrieval are affective”. First, I’m wondering if
by retrieval, he means an organism’s second encounter with a previously formed attitude or
stimuli? If this is so, is there evidence that there is differential processing the first time one
encounters a novel attitude-evoking stimuli than there is the second time that person
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encounters the same stimuli? i.e. perhaps the first reaction is purely affective, but presumably
one has the chance to elaborate more/use cognition before subsequent reactions. Does the
mere fact of this process itself, i.e. that one is able to cognitively elaborate on his or her
attitude, change the substance of the resulting attitude, even though it may be essentially the
same? I’m thinking of our usual example of one who, upon meeting a person from an outgroup
(e.g. a student at the rival school), implicitly forms a negative affective opinion of that person
and through subsequent interactions, is able to cognitively deduce that the negative affect is
legitimate (e.g. that person manifested objective demonstrations of being
intolerable/annoying/self-gratifying/etc). Does the mere fact that one was able to interact with
that person and corroborate the initial impression at all change the nature of either impression?
Does it provide legitimacy? This is in some ways related to the saliency/attribution component
of the Jones et al. paper, in that “the specific cause of one’s feelings is not always evident, and
they are therefore subject to processes of attribution”.
2. Related to my above question, I wonder what implications we think the issue of saliency has on
informing policy? In Irene’s section, we talked a bit about how social psych research is often
conducted out of context, though researchers make claims that their work can ultimately shape
policy. Zajonc’s discussion of dissonance (“We buy the cars we ‘like’, choose the jobs and houses
that we find ‘attractive’, and then justify those choices by various reasons that might appear
convincing to others who never fail to ask us, ‘why this car?’ or ‘why this house?’) made me
think of my own project, and how the use of dissonance might be used to explain a shift in what
is salient to an individual.
3. Gawronski et al. discuss the importance of attention to context clues. On the contrary, Zajonc
claims that affective reactions operate outside of attentive processes. Given these two
competing roles of attention, to what extent is it or isn’t it important in evaluations and
attitudes? Should efforts be made to control attention, or is it better to understand how
attitudes are formed at the sub-attentional level?
Jessica Jones
1) Zajonic posits that affect and cognition are partially independent systems and can consititude
different effects in information processing (Zajonc, 1980). When it comes to forming attitudes
then, it seems as though there are different ways in which attitudes are formed and the
requirements for an attitude to take place. Per our discussion last week, then, would we be able
to categorize attitude formation into mutually exclusive experiences- through cognitive efforts,
through affect, or perhaps even behavior? For example, an infant liking milk is an attitude
(affect), an infant realizing the stove is hot after touching it (behavior), or an infant refusing a
certain food after experiencing it (cognitive). This seems to align with the discussion of explicit
versus implicit and categorize attitudes by forming them in different ways.
2) Gawronski et al focus on showing automatic evaluations are highly dependent on the context in
which it is encountered, adding to the notion of primacy and regency effects in attitude
formation. The authors briefly note that attention may be a moderator of the effects observed,
which makes me wonder if attention falls under the same category as self-awareness. Reading
through the experiments studied, I understood the notion of context as an important factor, but
one’s level of self-awareness to the particular context could also be incredibly relevant. Age,
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maturity, emotional intelligence are all factors of self-awareness, which to me, may play a large
role in how we think about the role of context in attitude formation. If context is important,
should one’s awareness to that specific context also be evaluated?
3) As I did last week, I leave these readings this week a bit overwhelmed by the specifics of
particular attitudes formed at certain levels of cognition, social contexts, and before/after
particular effects in place. Has there been any consensus in the last five years to a particular
model of attitude formation? It is certainly a large construct that requires definitions before
pursuing further study, and I can’t help but ponder how to wrap my head around the general
construct of how attitudes are created, formed, and changed?
Lindsay Labrecque
1. I found the Jones et al. (2009) article regarding implicit misattribution and evaluative
conditioning to be particularly interesting especially as, implicit misattribution as a mechanism
in the process of evaluative conditioning seems to be a similar cognitive process (although under
different names) as the process that occurs in fear and anxiety disorders. At the risk of
comparing the processes too much, it is interesting that in anxiety disorders, individuals typically
avoid anxiety-inducing stimuli, at least from a behavioral perspective. It seems reasonable to
imagine that these same individuals might attend to the stimuli cognitively, which may in turn
heighten or maintain arousal. Drawing parallels from this to the Jones et al. (2009) paper, it
seems to me that the significant eye tracker data may be a result of task demands. I am
wondering about the utility of eye tracker technology as a method of examining implicit
misattribution and about the meaning of fixations. Do eye fixations really measure or imply
evaluation? In addition, I wonder how the EC in these studies was possibly impacted by the
subjects’ possible familiarity with the pokemon cartoon used in the experiments (per Gawronski
et al., 2010) given that it seems likely many participants had some prior contextual evaluations
related to pokemon.
2. According to Zajonc (1980), “…models for affect preferences are formed and expressed only
after and only as a result of considerable prior cognitive activity…I argue, along with Wundt and
Cummings, that to arouse affect, objects need to be cognized very little – in fact, minimally” (p.
154). Gawronski et al. (2010) demonstrate various conditions under which automatic
evaluations reflect initial or the addition of novel information. If Zajonc is “right,” that an
affective preference for an object requires little cognitive processing, then what forms the basis
of these automatic evaluations? Is is a valenced belief, an attitude, the context? What role, if
any, does affect play in automatic evaluations?
3. Again, I found the Gawronski et al. (2010) paper quite interesting. However, I’m not sure if I fully
buy into their assertion that “…attention to context cues is typically low during the encoding of
initial information about a target object…” (p. 696). Specifically, how is it that these experiences
are stored context-free? Do we not, to some degree, use context to interpret or as the basis of
our evaluations? That is, does context not provide the cues for the appropriateness of
information about a target object? If not contextual cues, then what are we encoding initial
information from?
Shana Stites
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Zajonc’s (1980) discussion of feelings versus thoughts, especially regarding the time course for
each in relation to the other, reminded me of LeDoux’s “high road” and “low road.” Affect can
be more immediate, with very little cognitive processing outside of basic sensory and perceptual
processes or it can be more cognitive, the result of having thought about the context in which
the affect was elicited. So cognition can accompany affect, but it need not do so. The seeming
value of cognition over affect in our daily leads us to say we are rational creatures and yet we
hold on to attitudes even after the cognitive basis of an attitude has been discredited. What is it
about the “hot” affective processes that seem inferior to the “cold” cognitive processes, when
both contribute so meaningfully to our success (ex: statements about the emotionality of
women compared to men are not generally meant as compliments)?
Both Zajonc (1980) and Gawronski et al. (2010) talked about the primacy of affect/evaluations.
While the basic ideas about primacy of attitudes were similar, Gawronski et al. had definitely
made good use of the intervening 30 years and additional research to come up with some
potential reasons why that primacy effect would hold in certain situations but not in others. I
read them in chronological order initially, but when I went back to look at the Zajonc paper after
reading Gawronski et al., the statements made by the former could be interpreted through the
representational model proposed by the latter. Because the Zajonc paper was written much
longer ago, it seemed that in his discussion of the primacy of attitudes that he was referring
more to what we currently call explicitly measured attitudes while Gawronski et al. were
examining changes in implicitly measured attitudes. To what extent do the moderating effects
of attention to context influence more explicitly measured attitudes?
Jones et al. (2009) in their paper argued that evaluative conditioning (EC) and Pavlovian
conditioning (PC) are distinct processes and that the requirements for PC are not necessarily the
same for EC. Jones et al. mentioned that EC is more resistant to extinction than PC (this is
unfortunate in terms of learned prejudicial attitudes). Other ideas associated with PC, but not
mentioned specifically in the article, are stimulus generalization and stimulus discrimination. By
this I mean the likelihood that following PC or EC that the “leaner” responds similarly to other
similar stimuli or not (i.e. Pavlov’s dogs salivate to other similar stimuli). The Gawronski et al.
article did address this to some extent, but discussed generalization and contextualization in
terms of the environment. To what extent does an evaluative response to the stimulus itself
generalize to other similar stimuli? Using these particular study stimuli, I would want to know
what moderators would make people respond similarly to other Pokemon characters or other
cartoons that weren’t actually from Pokemon.
Phoenix van Wagnoner
Zajonc has a section where he points out affective judgments are always about the self (p.
157). Yet we know that context matters in our evaluations and we can conflate evaluations
between objects. An individuals mood is an obvious contextual element that would change an
evaluation of an object. However, it seems nonrecursive in that the evaluation could impact
mood and possibly change subsequent evaluations in close temporal proximity. I could see the
case where mood has a strong effect on implicit associations, even overwhelming them. Can we
control for mood in our attitude experiments without priming?
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As Zajonc pointed out Affective judgments often come before cognition and can become
separated from content. This idea ties into Gawronski et al.’s argument that automatic
evaluations “reflect the valence of counter- attitudinal information only in the context in which
this information was learned (occasion setting) and the valence of initial experiences in any
other context (renewal effect)” (p.933). Were does this leave us with implicit misattribution?
Would evaluative conditioning that presents a counter attitudinal association be subtyped and
context dependent? Can a counter attitudinal evaluation be considered an evaluation of the
same object in the first place, given the different context?
Are two temporally different evaluations of the same object in three dimensional space actually
evaluating the same object at all? Could this be the reason we fail test retest reliability and
parallel test reliability? What do meta-analyses tell us?
Brooke Carter
Zajonc (1980) describes the complicated interplay between affect and cognition. How do these
two process apply to Gawronski et al.’s (2010) work on generalization and contextualization? Is
the brain classifying various relationships between objects/valence/contexts in a cognitive,
categorical manner or in a more general affective manner? Does the automatic nature of these
evaluations shed any light on this question?
Most, if not all, models of attitude change, decision making, belief formation, etc., that
incorporate both affect and cognition view these two systems as independent
processes. However, could they be viewed as a combined process that uses cognitive logic and
probability to build a representation, but always results in an affective decision? Take the
seemingly pure cognitive evaluation that “2 + 2 = 4” as an example. Does the belief that this
representation is true come from an affective marker associated with certainty and confidence
in one’s prior experience with arithmetic? Similarly, I would argue that incongruency of “2+2=5”
just “feels” wrong in some sense. Do deliberations that are devoid of uncertainty and ambiguity
create an affective state that we have named rationality or cognition?
Both the Jones and Gawronski articles investigated the creation of evaluative associations from
a bottom-up perspective. They varied stimulus attributes and relationships between stimuli to
affect subsequent associations. However, many evaluative associations seem to build on
previously held associations. What top-down factors influence the formation of new
associations? How do they interact with the bottom-up factors studied in these papers? Do
certain personal biases make the context more salient in certain situations, such as times when
the object (CS) already holds a valence incongruent with the US?
Alex Kirk
1. The article by Gawronski, Rydell, Vervliet, and De Houwer (2010) is actually remarkably relevant
to the therapy mechanisms I study with regards to exposure therapy for anxiety disorders (e.g.,
inhibitory learning, much of which relates to Mark Bouton’s work). The idea of formulating two
associations with a given stimulus (i.e., context-free and context-based) poses certain
complications with regards to treatment outcomes, particularly with regards to fear-based
disorders (e.g., phobias) in terms of maintaining long-term reductions in fear. This has typically
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been overcome by generalizing exposure therapy to multiple contexts in hopes of generalizing
the effects. What I would be curious to better understand is: how might these sorts of learning
effects apply to more diffuse, long-lasting beliefs? For instance, when it comes to discriminatory
beliefs, or maybe long-term major depression, how might these findings inform the actual
changing of beliefs that are often associated with the core of a person’s worldview either about
themselves or the world in general? Can these extend beyond short-term laboratory effects? Is
a greater temporal consistency required (i.e., continual violation of expectancies for a greater
period of time)?
2. The concept behind evaluative conditioning (EC) is indeed interesting, where an attitude
towards a stimulus forms or changes due to that object’s pairing with positively or negatively
valenced stimuli (Jones, Fazio, & Olson, 2009). However, one thing I am curious to know is what
EC brings to psychology beyond common cognitive theories such as schema theory, or
behavioral theories such as relational frame theory (RFT), where associations among different
stimuli/events can change the perceptions or attitudes towards those stimuli/events based on
how they are related. The EC process itself sounds like an automatic one, and so what I am
curious to know is what these findings (i.e., changing attitudes towards a stimulus based on how
that stimulus is paired with other stimuli) might imply with regards to the Gawronski et al.
(2010) article? That is, if attitudes can be formed/changed automatically and relatively easily
simply based on associations; does this have implications for either renewal effects as
delineated by Gawronski et al., or for attitude change via violation of expectancies?
3. The article by Zajonc (1980) has interesting implications for the work by Gawronski et al. (2010).
Zajonc proposes that, while much of psychology considers affect to occur after cognitive
operations have been performed, he delineates situations where affect may occur before such
cognitive operations. With regards to the work by Gawronski et al., what I am curious to better
understand is: what role might affect play in informing context effects of beliefs regarding
certain stimuli? For example: if one were to perform a fear learning/extinction experiment,
would belief change (i.e., cognitive recognition of no threat) via violation of expectancies
precede affective change (i.e., reduced fear)? Or would this relationship be reversed where a
change in affect leads to a change in belief?
Maggie Tobias
1. A common theme in this week’s readings was that we don’t seem to form our attitudes in as
neat and logical a way as we would like to think. Zajonc comes to the conclusion that we do not
make many decisions, even large ones, based on a “detailed cognitive analysis” (172), implying
that our preferences and decisions are instead based primarily on immediate affective
responses. The Jones article builds upon this argument, showing how during this process we are
prone to misattribute the cause for an affective response, leading to evaluative conditioning.
Taken together, these ideas paint a picture of attitudes and preferences that might appear
bleak; they seem to suggest that we aren’t nearly as logical and thoughtful when building
attitudes as we might believe, and in fact, we likely hold certain attitudes due to mistaken
attribution formation! Since it likely isn’t as simple as just deeming Jones’s EC and Zajonc’s
affective responding outright maladaptive, it instead is important to consider the implications of
each effect. Furthermore, what adaptive functions might these features hold?
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2. Setting aside the implicit versus explicit attitudes discussion from last week’s reading, what does
it mean for the idea of a “true attitude” that our automatic evaluations for the same object can
change in different contexts and that our attitudes can be formed or changed due to mistaken
attribution via evaluative conditioning? This also brings up general concerns for attitude
measurement in research.
3. Is the idea that we could still have certain attitudes that are so strong as to be contextindependent simply incorrect, given this body of research? I think a very basic reaction to these
readings might be to argue that we all have a few objects or concepts that we feel too strongly
opinionated on to ever demonstrate any degree of malleability in relation to them. Is this
possible, or more likely a story we tell ourselves to reaffirm the thoughtful and purposeful status
of our attitudes and subsequent evaluative conduct?
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