Abstract
Attitudes are not static, but constructed at the moment of the evaluation, incorporating temporary contextual influences. How do meaningful events that naturally occur within a culture, such as a national holiday, shape evaluative judgments of objects related to the holiday? We focused on evaluations of red roses and gift chocolates, which are everyday objects, but also iconic of Valentine’s Day in the U.S. We reasoned that if cultural events shape evaluations, then roses and chocolates would be evaluated differently near Valentine’s Day. Using a large and diverse U.S. sample, we found that as Valentine’s Day neared, evaluations of roses and chocolates (but not a comparison object) were evaluated more positively. Increases in positivity of roses and chocolates covaried with their increased cultural relevance, as quantified by the volume of web search queries involving these terms. These findings provide a demonstration of naturally occurring cultural priming by which the salience of cultural events shape evaluations.
Highlights
Valentine’s Day is one of the U.S.’s most popular holidays (Close and Zinkhan, 2006)
Our main question is: Do evaluations of roses and chocolates change as Valentine’s Day approaches, and are shifts in evaluations related to shifts in the cultural salience of roses and chocolates? This conjecture is plausible given that evaluative judgments are assumed to be constructed at the moment of the evaluation rather than reflecting trait-like attitudes (Schwarz and Bohner, 2001)
Red roses and gift chocolates are objects commonly encountered in everyday life, they are relevant during the Valentine’s Day season1
Summary
Valentine’s Day is one of the U.S.’s most popular holidays (Close and Zinkhan, 2006). To illustrate, when evaluating roses, a person brings to mind the mental representation of roses This may include their physical features, related experiences (past, desired, feared; Berridge et al, 2009; Dai et al, 2010), and relevance to current goals (Ferguson and Bargh, 2004). We hypothesized that one source of contextual influence on evaluations are meaningful events that occur naturally in a culture, such as a National Holiday. We refer to this phenomenon as cultural priming This phenomenon is distinct from past work examining how temporary, contextual influence shape evaluative judgments via standard priming techniques in which researchers deliberately expose participants to stimuli that activate conceptual knowledge (Fazio et al, 1986; Ferguson and Bargh, 2004). Red roses and gift chocolates are objects commonly encountered in everyday life, they are relevant during the Valentine’s Day season. We asked respondents to evaluate an image of an online dating product as a comparison because it is not a symbol of love, but is associated with relationships or the prospect thereof
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