Agency influences vicarious approach/avoidance effects

ABSTRACT

Social learning plays a prominent role in shaping individual preferences. The vicarious approach-avoidance effect consists of developing a preference for attitudinal objects that have been approached over objects that have been avoided by another person (model). In two experiments (N = 448 participants), we explored how the vicarious approach-avoidance effect is affected by agency (model’s voluntary choice) and identification with the model. The results consistently revealed vicarious approach-avoidance effects in preference, as indicated by the semantic differential and the Implicit Association Test. Agency increased the size of the preference assessed through the semantic differential but did not significantly impact preference in the Implicit Association Test. Identification with the model had no significant impact on the vicarious approach-avoidance effect. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social learning
• vicarious approach-avoidance
• agency
• propositional learning
• attitudes

Disclosure statement

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

Open science statement

Open Data and Analysis are available here: https://osf.io/hjndr/?view_only=23d19bb7b37c465886492072bac902f3.

The preregistrations are available here: https://osf.io/v2gnx/?view_only=fe864e88a3ac42d691ebb8a6eec804bc (Experiment 1).

https://osf.io/24fgd/?view_only=962e8dc75a7e40ebb3a0703b69de20aa (Experiment 2).

All conditions and dependent variables are reported and the studies are described in sufficient detail to allow replication.

The studies were approved by the local ethical commission (amendment 17/5/2022 to protocol 2021/431).

Notes

1 Analyses without excluding participants who did not remember the approached target and how the choice was made showed the same pattern of results (those who answered no to SRSI use-me and those with inadequate IAT performance were excluded). Further, nine participants answered the demand characteristics question indicating that they were undecided (option 3) or complied quite a lot (option 4) with what they believed the researchers expected. We performed parallel analyses discarding these nine participants and obtained very similar results. Therefore, following the preregistration, here we report the analyses without discarding them (these results are available here: https://osf.io/hjndr/?view_only=23d19bb7b37c465886492072bac902f3).

2 The results of the parallel analyses are available here: https://osf.io/hjndr/?view_only=23d19bb7b37c465886492072bac902f3.

3 Based on the observed size of the vicarious effect on the IAT, η_p² = 0.064, an one-tenth impact of agency would mean an effect size for agency of η_p² = 0.006. With power (1-β) = .80 and significance α = .025 this would require a sample of 1488 participants. However, future studies would not necessarily require such high samples to detect effects of agency on the IAT, as previous research (Zogmaister et al., 2023) showed vicarious approach-avoidance effects in the IAT of similar size as in the semantic differential: The smaller size of the vicarious IAT effect in this study could be due to random fluctuation.

4 According to dual-process explanations, two qualitatively different types of processes underlie evaluative responses; one type is usually considered more controlled, and the other more automatic. The impactful APE Model (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006, 2018), for instance, distinguishes associative and propositional processes. Responses to indirect measures such as the IAT are often thought to reflect predominantly the associative/automatic processes, and self-report measures are typically considered as an expression of mainly propositional/controlled processes.

5 As shown in Tables 1 and 2, no significant correlation emerged between self-reported similarity and identification on the one hand and the preference for the product approached by the model (IAT and Semantic Differential) on the other hand. This further supports the conclusion that the vicarious approach-avoidance effect in the present studies was unaffected by similarity and identification.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [grant number 952464].