Beyond contingency awareness: the role of influence awareness in resisting conditioned attitudes

ABSTRACT

Evaluative conditioning procedures change people’s evaluations of stimuli that are paired with pleasant or unpleasant items. To test whether influence awareness allows people to resist such persuasive attempts, we conducted three experiments. In the first two experiments featuring low levels of influence awareness (N1 = 96, N2 = 93) we manipulated the degree of control people have in expressing their attitudes, by providing participants in one condition with the option to “pass” rather than respond, when they felt influenced in their evaluations of conditioned stimuli. In the third experiment (N3 = 240) we manipulated the level of influence awareness by using a warning instruction similar to the one found in prior controllability studies, while giving everyone the option to pass the evaluation when they felt influenced. All studies found that participants often failed to use the skip option to exert control over conditioned preferences. In some cases, this may be because participants failed to notice the pairings, but in most cases because participants lacked awareness that the pairings could influence them. Even when explicitly warned that the pairings could influence them, participants seemed to believe that they were not vulnerable to such effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Evaluative conditioning
• conditioned attitudes
• persuasion knowledge
• influence awareness
• contingency awareness
• controllability

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author.

Acknowledgement

We thank Jan De Houwer and another anonymous reviewer for providing helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Florin A. Sava http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8898-1306

Silvia Măgurean http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9387-0379

Andrei Rusu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0036-4149

Notes

1 Because of space restrictions, more details about the stimuli and the verbatim instructions used across all three experiments are included as supplementary materials.

2 In Experiment 2 we also administrated an Affect Misattribution Procedure. The analysis is less relevant for the aim of the paper; therefore, it was not included in this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Romanian Ministry of National Education, CNCS – UEFISCDI, under grant PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0621.