From Halo to Conditioning and Back Again: Exploring the Links Between Impression Formation and Learning

Abstract

Impression formation effects – such as the halo effect – and learning effects – such as evaluative or attribute conditioning effects – are often seen as separate classes of phenomena. In a recent conceptual paper, De Houwer et al. (2019) suggested that both may actually qualify as instances of feature transformation, where a source feature (e.g., attractiveness of a face; valence of an unconditioned stimulus; US) influences judgements about a target feature (e.g., social competence of a person; valence of a conditioned stimulus; CS). In halo effects, the source and target features typically differ (e.g., a person with an attractive face is judged as more socially competent) but belong to the same object. In evaluative conditioning, source and target features are the same (e.g., a neutral CS is judged as more positive after being paired with a positive US) but belong to different objects. In this paper, we highlight a phenomenon at the crossroads of the two previous effects: feature transformation where source and target features are different (as in halo studies) and belong to different objects that are paired together (as in evaluative conditioning studies). Across six pre-registered experiments (n = 1050), we obtained evidence for this phenomenon in the context of person perception (i.e., attractiveness halo) and food perception (i.e., health halo). We also show that this type of feature transformation is influenced by several known moderators of halo and conditioning effects (beliefs about traits relationship, memory of pairings, and salience of the source feature).