Abstract
Attitudes (or opinions, preferences, biases, stereotypes) can be considered bindings of the perceptual features of the attitudes’ object to affective codes with positive or negative connotations, which effectively renders them “event files” in terms of the Theory of Event Coding. We tested a particularly interesting implication of this theoretical account: that affective codes might “migrate” from one event file to another (i.e., effectively function as a component of one while actually being part of another), if the two files overlap in terms of other features. We tested this feature-migration hypothesis by having participants categorize pictures of fictitious outer space characters as members of two fictitious races by pressing a left or right key, and to categorize positive and negative pictures of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) as positive and negative by using the same two keys. When the outer space characters were later rated for likability, members of the race that was categorized by means of the same key as positive IAPS pictures were liked significantly more than members of the race that was categorized with the same key as negative IAPS pictures – suggesting that affective feature codes from the event files for the IAPS pictures effectively acted as an ingredient of event files for the outer space characters that shared the same key. These findings were fully replicated in a second experiment in which the two races were replaced by two unfamiliar fonts. These outcomes are consistent with the claim that attitudes, opinions, and preferences are represented in terms of event files and created by feature binding.
Highlights
Even though psychology has a long tradition of treating social and non-social cognition separately in theorizing and empirical research, there is increasing interest in possible commonalities and overlap between these fields
First attempts have successfully used Theory of Event Coding (TEC) to account for some aspects of social behavior, like conformity (Kim & Hommel, 2015), trust (Hommel & Colzato, 2015), and self-other integration (Colzato et al, 2013), and the aim of the present study was to see whether TEC might help to understand how human attitudes, opinions, and preferences are acquired and cognitively represented
Attitudes can be considered to be represented by event files that bind codes of the features characterizing the state of affairs the attitude refers to with representations of the affective state the person has experienced in the context of this state of affairs
Summary
Even though psychology has a long tradition of treating social and non-social cognition separately in theorizing and empirical research, there is increasing interest in possible commonalities and overlap between these fields. A strong boost in shared interests can be attributed to the social-cognition approach emerging in the early 1980s, which claimed that much can be learned from studying the cognitive processes underlying social behavior (Hamilton & Carlston, 2013) This has become the dominant approach in modern social psychology, but the Psychon Bull Rev. Knowing and understanding people’s attitudes, opinions, and preferences is the key to success for businesspeople and marketing engineers, and for political leaders in democratic societies. While science has fully acknowledged the great impact and importance of these concepts on both individual behavior and societal interactions, we know very little about the mechanisms underlying their formation, maintenance, and use These three, and other related concepts (including bias, prejudice, and stereotype; all of which we collectively refer to as “attitudes” in the following), are commonly not well defined and if they are, their definitions overlap substantially (e.g., see Fiske & Taylor, 1991). A cherry connoisseur is likely to possess event files that bind the perceptual features of cherries, such as their round shape, their red color, and their sweet taste, with a somatic/affective marker (Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1991) of the positive feeling that the person associates with being exposed to cherries
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