Implicit attitude formation through classical conditioning. Psych Sci

Abstract—We sought to demonstrate that attitudes can develop through implicit covariation detection in a new classical conditioning paradigm. In two experiments purportedly about surveillance and vigilance, participants viewed several hundred randomly presented words and images interspersed with critical pairings of valenced un-conditioned stimuli (USs) with novel conditioned stimuli (CSs). Atti-tudes toward the novel objects were influenced by the paired USs: In a surprise evaluation task, the CS paired with positive items was evaluated more positively than the CS paired with negative items. This attitudinal conditioning effect was found using both an explicit measure (Experiments 1 and 2) and an implicit measure (Experiment 2). In a covariation estimation task involving the stimuli presented in the conditioning procedure, participants displayed no explicit mem-ory for the pairings. Attitude formation, how people come to evaluate objects in the en-vironment positively and negatively, is a long-standing issue in social psychology. A fundamental form of attitude acquisition, classical con-ditioning, has struck the curiosities of not only social psychologist