Beyond awareness and resources: evaluative conditioning may be sensitive to processing goals

"Evaluative conditioning (EC) is often regarded as an automatic affective learning process. Yet, recent empirical evidence suggests that EC may actually be sensitive to contingency awareness and to the availability of attentional resources. Here, we examine for the first time a third horseman of EC automaticity: processing goals. Specifically, we had participants engage an EC task after completing a task known to elicit the goal of processing either the perceptual similarities or the perceptual differences between stimuli. EC was predicted and found to be larger in the former (similarity-focus) than in the latter (difference-focus) condition. This finding provides original evidence that EC is sensitive to the processing goal activated in participants as they encode the CS–US pairings. The theoretical implications of this finding are discussed." [author's abstract

Psychologie Sociale

info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Psychologie sociale: Seconde édition

info:eu-repo/semantics/inPress

Dilution of stereotype-based cooperation in mixed-motive interdependence

Expanded the finding that nondiagnostic information about a target reduces the impact of stereotypes on person perception and social judgment by examining this dilution effect in settings of mixed- motive outcome-interdependence and by studying stereotype-based cognition as well as cooperative behavior. Three experiments involving a total of 250 undergraduates and employing Prisoner's and Chicken Dilemma Games revealed that people cooperate less when category information suggests that the other is competitive and immoral rather than cooperative and honest, but not when nondiagnostic attribute information is added. Exp 3 showed that people try to interpret attribute information as consistent with their stereotype-based beliefs; dilution occurs only when it is impossible to construe attribute information as consistent with the stereotype.

Social categorization and fear reactions to the September 11th terrorist attacks

Item does not contain fulltextTwo experiments were run in The Netherlands and Belgium 1 week after the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. The aim was to investigate whether social categorization affected emotional reactions, behavioral tendencies, and actual behaviors. Results showed that focusing participants’ attention on an identity that included American victims into a common ingroup led them to report more fear and stronger fear-related behavioral tendencies and to engage more often in fear-related behaviors than when victims were categorized as outgroup members. Results are discussed with respect to appraisal theories of emotion and E. R. Smith’s model of group-based emotions.12 p