Agency influences vicarious approach/avoidance effects.

Social learning plays a prominent role in shaping individual preferences. The vicarious approach-avoidance effect consists of developing a preference for attitudinal objects that have been approached over objects that have been avoided by another person (model). In two experiments (N = 448 participants), we explored how the vicarious approach-avoidance effect is affected by agency (model's voluntary choice) and identification with the model. The results consistently revealed vicarious approach-avoidance effects in preference, as indicated by the semantic differential and the Implicit Association Test. Agency increased the size of the preference assessed through the semantic differential but did not significantly impact preference in the Implicit Association Test. Identification with the model had no significant impact on the vicarious approach-avoidance effect. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Incidental Attitude Formation via the Surveillance Task: A Preregistered Replication of the Olson and Fazio (2001) Study.

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered (N = 1,478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study (Olson & Fazio, 2001). We obtained evidence for a small evaluative-conditioning effect when "aware" participants were excluded using the original criterion-therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance-task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about "unaware" evaluative-conditioning effects.

Why a standard IAT effect cannot provide evidence for association formation: the role of similarity construction.

Moran and Bar-Anan (Moran, T., & Bar-Anan, Y. (2013). The effect of object-valence relations on automatic evaluation. Cognition and Emotion, 27(4), 743-752) demonstrated that evaluations on a direct measure reflected information on both US valence and CS-US relations, whereas evaluations on an indirect measure (IAT) reflected only information on US valence. This dissociation between measures supposedly tapping into propositional and associative processes apparently supports dual process models of EC. In the present study, we present an alternative explanation of this pattern, based on an interpretation of IAT effects in terms of flexible similarity construction processes. According to this account, processing draws on those features that discriminate between target categories, and help to align targets with attributes in the compatible block. Across two experiments, we consistently found that IAT effects did not reflect rigid associations, but instead depended on whichever information could be used for similarity constructions between targets and attributes in different variants of the IAT. The findings are discussed with regard to theoretical models of EC as well as in reference to prominent accounts of IAT performance.

Evaluative conditioning of pattern-masked nonwords requires perceptual awareness.

The evaluative conditioning (EC) phenomenon is central to the study of preference acquisition and attitude formation. Early studies have reported EC in the absence of awareness, but more recent work has questioned this conclusion. In previous work, using briefly presented and pattern-masked conditioned stimuli (CSs), we found that above-chance forced-choice identification of CSs is necessary for EC. Here we extend this work by addressing more directly the inherently subjective issue of consciousness. In 2 studies, we assessed whether above-threshold perceptual awareness of CSs is necessary for EC. Contrasting unconscious learning claims, EC was absent under low and intermediate levels of perceptual awareness. Additional findings suggest that the perceptual awareness task does not interfere with EC, and that it is more sensitive than memory-based awareness proxies. We also found that a confounded variant of the forced-choice identification task can artifactually induce EC; and that an unconfounded version of the task does not induce nor interfere with EC. We discuss limitations of the present studies as well as their relevance for the debate about the automaticity of evaluative learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).