Liked for their looks: evaluative conditioning and the generalisation of conditioned attitudes in early childhood

ABSTRACT

Recent studies explored whether attitude formation in early childhood can be explained in terms of evaluative conditioning (EC), the change in liking that is due to the pairing of stimuli. This study sought to replicate and extend this line of research by investigating whether and under what conditions preschool children generalise EC effects from conditioned to novel stimuli. Specifically, two experiments were conducted in which 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 139) observed the pairing of two cartoon characters with two positive and negative images. Afterwards, children evaluated the paired characters as well as other novel characters, which were not previously presented, that varied systematically in their perceptual similarity to the conditioned stimuli (Experiments 1 & 2), or that could be grouped by a categorisation rule (Experiment 2). It was found that children generalised attitudes to perceptually similar stimuli, but not to stimuli related by a categorisation rule, despite evidence for rule-learning. Implications of these findings for attitude development are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood
• evaluative conditioning
• similarity
• rules
• induction

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ayça Beckemeier, Leona Gooßens, and Charlotte Heinz for their help in preparing the materials, and for collecting the data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We also included a rating scale task showing a smiling, a neutral, and a frowning face in which CSs were to be evaluated independently. Preference scores based on these ratings are shown in the Table. However, because the experimenter observed that many of the younger children had difficulties in understanding what to do, we excluded the results of this task from further analyses.