Learning to like or dislike by association: No need for contingency awareness

Anger as a Hidden Motivator

The authors examined whether creating associations between products and anger, a negative but also approach-related emotion, motivates people to get or invest in these products when these products are considered attainable. Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants spontaneously spent more physical effort to get anger-related (compared to neutral) products they could attain as gifts. Experiment 2 showed that participants paid more money for anger-related (compared to neutral) products and thus perceived them as more valuable, regardless of whether the anger–product association was established consciously or unconsciously. Importantly, Experiment 2 also revealed that anger-related products were only perceived as more valuable when they were considered in terms of attainability. The authors conclude that anger can be a hidden motivator: Anger-related products that are perceived in terms of attainability act as rewards that motivate people to obtain these products.

Evaluative Conditioning: The "How" Question

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to attitude formation or change toward an object due to that object's mere co-occurrence with another valenced object or objects. This chapter focuses on the "how" question, that is, the question of what cognitive processes intervene between mere co-occurrence and attitude formation or change. Though EC has typically been thought of as occurring through a single, albeit contentious, mechanism, we begin by pointing out that both the heterogeneity of EC methodologies and the abundance of inconsistent results suggest that multiple processes with different characteristics can produce EC. We describe how the earliest posited process of EC, Pavlovian conditioning or signal learning, is a valid mechanism of EC that appears to have operated in some experiments but is unlikely to have operated in others and also cannot account for various EC findings. We describe other mechanisms of EC, when they can be expected to occur, and what characteristics they have. We particularly focus our attention on a process model of EC we have recently introduced, the implicit misattribution model. Finally, we describe the implications of a multi-process view of EC, which we argue can help resolve theoretical controversies and further the application of EC as a practical intervention for influencing attitudes in various domains.