ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION Attitude Formation Through Exploration: Valence Asymmetries

The formation of attitudes toward novel objects was examined as a function of exploratory behavior. An initial experiment, in which participants played a computer game that required them to learn which stimuli, when sampled, produced favorable or unfavorable outcomes, demonstrated learning, attitude formation, and generalization to novel objects. The findings also revealed 2 interesting valence asym-metries: a learning asymmetry involving better learning for negatively valenced than positively valenced objects and a generalization asymmetry involving stronger generalization as a function of negative than of positive attitudes. Findings from 4 experiments led to an explanation of the learning asymmetry in terms of information gain being contingent on approach behavior and related the generalization asym-metry to a negativity bias that weighs resemblance to a known negative more heavily than resemblance to a positive. Despite the central role that the attitude concept has occupied in social psychology, relatively little attention has focused on the processes involved in attitude formation per se. The field as a whole has attended more to questions regarding attitude change, attitude structure and function, and influences of attitudes o