Psychology Addict # 14 | Evaluative Conditioning – How we come to like & dislike things.

Is there a name of a person you kind of cringe when you hear? You sure know the reason why that happens: evaluative conditioning; which is just the name psychology has for the association you make between that very name and the unpleasant person you have in mind who answers to it. Yeah, that individual who either frustrated or upset you in the past! So, what are you doing now? Transferring all those bothersome feelings to the actual word (the name itself)! Of course, the same goes for that song that makes you smile when it plays on the radio or in some store. It probably was the soundtrack of an incredible trip or an unforgettable celebration.

Therefore, evaluative conditioning is the disliking or liking of a given thing as a consequence of its association with a negative or positive experience, person, object and so forth. In case Pavlovian conditioning (or, classical conditioning) comes to mind, you got it. It is very similar indeed: a conditional stimulus (the person’ name) gained the capacity to trigger a response (your irritation) because of its earlier pairing with the unconditional stimulus (the unpleasant person).

There is an industry which knows this principle too well and applies it largely: advertisement. Evaluative conditioning is a great technique for advertising, as it can cause us to come to like something without us even being aware of it (of course, the opposite can also occur).

There is an interesting psychological experiment that successfully demonstrates this.

An overview of an experiment on using celebrities to popularize a sporting event

There were four parts to this experiment in total and the participants were Taiwanese graduate students. For the purpose of this post, only part 1 and 3 are going to be briefly discussed, which had 80 participants on board.

The experiment

The experiment consisted of showing participants five-minute slideshows displaying: made-up products, sceneries, and abstract paintings. Among these images, two were of more importance: a celebrity figure and the sporting event (a baseball game). Half of the participants watched the slideshow that paired the sporting event with the celebrity figure, displaying one immediately after the other (5 times throughout the presentation), while the remaining forty participants watched a different slideshow that showed all the images randomly.

The hypothesis was that those who watched the slideshow with the paired images would develop a positive approach towards the sporting event. The hypotheses was accepted.

Results & Further Studies

The experimenter’s findings revealed that the participants who were exposed to the systematic pairing of the celebrity and baseball event images demonstrated a more positive approach towards the sport event than those who watched the slideshow which displayed them randomly; corroborating that evaluative conditioning can be effectively used to influence people’s attitudes.

Further still, the study of Hollands et al.(2011), also demonstrated that the principles of evaluative conditioning also impact, in a short term, people’s behaviour. In this study, some participants watched a short film which presented the pairing of unhealthy food pictures with images showing the consequences of bad eating habits. The remaining participants saw a slideshow of the same unhealthy snacks with no negative images at all. The former group subsequently to watching the presentation went for more healthier snack options than the latter.

Conclusion

These studies don’t analyse how the positive or negative feelings elicited by the celebrity figure or the sickly person, for example, are transferred to the sports event and the unhealthy snack. This is something that the researchers actually suggest it could be investigated further. However, they do provide evidence for the principles of evaluative conditioning - something which is especially put in practice by big brands and advertisers.

[Original content by Abigail Dantes - 2017]

Reference List:

Chen, C. –Y., Lin Y. – H. and Hsiao, C. (2012) ‘Celebrity endorsement for sporting events using classical conditioning´, International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship, April, pp. 209-19.

Hollands, G.J., Prestwich, A. And Marteau, T.M. (2011) ‘Using aversive images to enhance healthy food choices and implicit attitudes: an experimental test of evaluative conditioning’, Health Psychology, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 195-203.

Image Source 1, 2