TY - JOUR
T1 - Attitude change via repeated evaluative pairings versus evaluative statements
T2 - Shared and unique features
AU - Kurdi, Benedek
AU - Banaji, Mahzarin R.
N1 - Funding Information:
Parts of the data reported in this article have been presented at the Fifth European Meeting on the Psychology of Attitudes, Cologne, Germany, in July 2016; the 18th Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, TX, in January 2017; the Sixth Annual Symposium for Boston-Area Graduate Students in Psychology, Boston, MA, in April 2017; and the 18th General Meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology, Granada, Spain, in July 2017. All data files, analysis scripts, and stimuli used in this project are available for download from the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/serq4/). We thank Sarah Ryan for assistance with study coding as well as the Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University for financial support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Psychological Association.
PY - 2019/5
Y1 - 2019/5
N2 - When tested immediately, evaluative statements (ES; verbal information about upcoming categories and their positive/negative attributes) surprisingly shift implicit (IAT) attitudes more effectively than repeated evaluative pairings (REP; actual pairing of category members with positive/negative attributes). The present project (total N = 5,317) explored the shared and unique features of these two attitude change modalities by probing (a) commonalities visible in the extent to which propositional inferences created by ES infiltrate REP learning and (b) differences visible in performance of ES and REP learning over time. In REP, the number of stimulus pairings (varied parametrically from 4 to 24) produced no effect (Study 1), but verbally describing stimulus pairings as diagnostic versus nondiagnostic did modulate learning (Study 2), suggesting that even REP give rise to some form of propositional representation. On the other hand, learning from ES decayed quickly, whereas learning from REP remained stable over time both within an immediate session of testing (Study 3) and following a 15-min delay (Study 4), revealinga difference between these two forms of learning. Beyond their theoretical import, these findings may inform interventions designed to produce short- and long-term change in implicit attitudes.
AB - When tested immediately, evaluative statements (ES; verbal information about upcoming categories and their positive/negative attributes) surprisingly shift implicit (IAT) attitudes more effectively than repeated evaluative pairings (REP; actual pairing of category members with positive/negative attributes). The present project (total N = 5,317) explored the shared and unique features of these two attitude change modalities by probing (a) commonalities visible in the extent to which propositional inferences created by ES infiltrate REP learning and (b) differences visible in performance of ES and REP learning over time. In REP, the number of stimulus pairings (varied parametrically from 4 to 24) produced no effect (Study 1), but verbally describing stimulus pairings as diagnostic versus nondiagnostic did modulate learning (Study 2), suggesting that even REP give rise to some form of propositional representation. On the other hand, learning from ES decayed quickly, whereas learning from REP remained stable over time both within an immediate session of testing (Study 3) and following a 15-min delay (Study 4), revealinga difference between these two forms of learning. Beyond their theoretical import, these findings may inform interventions designed to produce short- and long-term change in implicit attitudes.
KW - Associative learning
KW - Attitude change
KW - Evaluative conditioning
KW - Implicit attitudes
KW - Propositional learning
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U2 - 10.1037/pspa0000151
DO - 10.1037/pspa0000151
M3 - Article
C2 - 30829506
AN - SCOPUS:85062289038
SN - 0022-3514
VL - 116
SP - 681
EP - 703
JO - Journal of personality and social psychology
JF - Journal of personality and social psychology
IS - 5
ER -