Steven Sweldens

Evaluative Conditioning Procedures and the Resilience of Conditioned Brand Attitudes

Changing brand attitudes by pairing a brand with affectively laden stimuli such as celebrity endorsers or pleasant pictures is called evaluative conditioning. We show that this attitude change can occur in two ways, depending on how brands and affective stimuli are presented. Attitude change can result from establishing a memory link between brand and affective stimulus (indirect attitude change) or from direct “affect transfer” from affective stimulus to brand (direct attitude change). Direct attitude change is significantly more robust than indirect attitude change, for example, to changes in the valence of affective stimuli (unconditioned stimulus revaluation: e.g., endorsers falling from grace), to interference by subsequent information (e.g., advertising clutter), and to persuasion knowledge activation (e.g., consumer suspicion about being influenced). Indirect evaluative conditioning requires repeated presentations of a brand with the same affective stimulus. Direct evaluative conditioning requires simultaneous presentation of a brand with different affective stimuli.

Dissociating contingency awareness and conditioned attitudes: Evidence of contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning.

Whether human evaluative conditioning can occur without contingency awareness has been the subject of an intense and ongoing debate for decades, troubled by a wide array of methodological difficulties. Following recent methodological innovations, the available evidence currently points to the conclusion that evaluative conditioning effects do not occur without contingency awareness. In a simulation, we demonstrate, however, that these innovations are strongly biased toward the conclusion that evaluative conditioning requires contingency awareness, confounding the measurement of contingency memory with conditioned attitudes. We adopt a process-dissociation procedure to separate the memory and attitude components. In 4 studies, the attitude parameter is validated using existing attitudes and applied to probe for contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning. A fifth experiment incorporates a time-delay manipulation confirming the dissociability of the attitude and memory components. The results indicate that evaluative conditioning can produce attitudes without conscious awareness of the contingencies. Implications for theories of evaluative conditioning and associative learning are discussed.

The Role of Awareness in Attitude Formation Through Evaluative Conditioning

This article provides a review of past and contemporary debates regarding the role of awareness in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning (EC), that is, by repeatedly pairing a stimulus with other stimuli of positive or negative valence. Because EC is considered the most prototypical method to form and change the network of evaluative associations in memory, the role of awareness in this effect is critical to the question of whether attitudes may be formed and changed through dual processes. We analyze the reasons why there has been so much discussion and disagreement regarding the role of awareness, review past and contemporary methodologies and their limitations, discuss the role of mental processes and conditioning procedures, and identify promising directions for future research in this area.

The Propagation of Self-Control: Self-Control in One Domain Simultaneously Improves Self-Control in Other Domains.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 144(3) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (see record 2015-24174-008). The affiliations for co-authors Kuangjie Zhang and Steven Sweldens were incorrect. All versions of this article have been corrected.] A rich tradition in self-control research has documented the negative consequences of exerting self-control in 1 task for self-control performance in subsequent tasks. However, there is a dearth of research examining what happens when people exert self-control in multiple domains simultaneously. The current research aims to fill this gap. We integrate predictions from the most prominent models of self-control with recent neuropsychological insights in the human inhibition system to generate the novel hypothesis that exerting effortful self-control in 1 task can simultaneously improve self-control in completely unrelated domains. An internal meta-analysis on all 18 studies we conducted shows that exerting self-control in 1 domain (i.e., controlling attention, food consumption, emotions, or thoughts) simultaneously improves self-control in a range of other domains, as demonstrated by, for example, reduced unhealthy food consumption, better Stroop task performance, and less impulsive decision making. A subset of 9 studies demonstrates the crucial nature of task timing-when the same tasks are executed sequentially, our results suggest the emergence of an ego depletion effect. We provide conservative estimates of the self-control facilitation (d = |0.22|) as well as the ego depletion effect size (d = |0.17|) free of data selection and publication biases. These results (a) shed new light on self-control theories, (b) confirm recent claims that previous estimates of the ego depletion effect size were inflated due to publication bias, and (c) provide a blueprint for how to handle the power issues and associated file drawer problems commonly encountered in multistudy research projects.

Gender Identity Salience and Perceived Vulnerability to Breast Cancer

Breast cancer communications that make womens gender identity salient can trigger defense mechanisms and thereby interfere with key objectives of breast cancer campaigns. In a series of experiments, the authors demonstrate that increased gender identity salience lowered womens perceived vulnerability to breast cancer (Experiments 1a, 3a, and 3b), reduced their donations to ovarian cancer research (Experiment 1b), made breast cancer advertisements more difficult to process (Experiment 2a), and decreased ad memory (Experiment 2b). These results are contrary to the predictions of several prominent theoretical perspectives and a convenience sample of practitioners. The reduction in perceived vulnerability to breast cancer following gender identity primes can be eliminated by self-affirmation (Experiment 3a) and fear voicing (Experiment 3b), corroborating the hypothesis that these effects are driven by unconscious defense mechanisms.

The Symmetric Nature of Evaluative Memory Associations Equal Effectiveness of Forward Versus Backward Evaluative Conditioning

Changing attitudes by repeated co-occurrences of initially neutral stimuli (conditioned stimuli [CSs]) with affective entities (unconditioned stimuli [USs]) is called evaluative conditioning (EC). The vast majority of EC procedures in the literature are “forward” in nature, presenting the CS before the US. Scant empirical research into the issue has argued that forward procedures are more effective than backward procedures, but this research suffers from methodological issues while a meta-analysis indicated no difference. Two experiments show that backward conditioning procedures are equally effective in changing attitudes as forward conditioning procedures. Memory measures show that memory associations are equally strong from the CSs to the USs as from the USs to the CSs, irrespective of the presentation order (forward vs. backward) of the stimuli. Together the data support the proposition that the associations generated by EC are symmetric and bidirectional, rather than unidirectional, in nature.