Changing brand attitudes by pairing a brand with affectively laden stimuli such as celebrity endorsers or pleasant pictures is called evaluative conditioning. We show that this attitude change can occur in two ways, depending on how brands and affective stimuli are presented. Attitude change can result from establishing a memory link between brand and affective stimulus (indirect attitude change) or from direct "affect transfer" from affective stimulus to brand (direct attitude change). Direct attitude change is significantly more robust than indirect attitude change, for example, to changes in the valence of affective stimuli (unconditioned stimulus revaluation: e.g., endorsers falling from grace), to interference by subsequent information (e.g., advertising clutter), and to persuasion knowledge activation (e.g., consumer suspicion about being influenced). Indirect evaluative conditioning requires repeated presentations of a brand with the same affective stimulus. Direct evaluative conditioning requires simultaneous presentation of a brand with different affective stimuli. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Whether human evaluative conditioning can occur without contingency awareness has been the subject of an intense and ongoing debate for decades, troubled by a wide array of methodological difficulties. Following recent methodological innovations, the available evidence currently points to the conclusion that evaluative conditioning effects do not occur without contingency awareness. In a simulation, we demonstrate, however, that these innovations are strongly biased toward the conclusion that evaluative conditioning requires contingency awareness, confounding the measurement of contingency memory with conditioned attitudes. We adopt a process-dissociation procedure to separate the memory and attitude components. In 4 studies, the attitude parameter is validated using existing attitudes and applied to probe for contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning. A fifth experiment incorporates a time-delay manipulation confirming the dissociability of the attitude and memory components. The results indicate that evaluative conditioning can produce attitudes without conscious awareness of the contingencies. Implications for theories of evaluative conditioning and associative learning are discussed.

This article provides a review of past and contemporary debates regarding the role of awareness in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning (EC), that is, by repeatedly pairing a stimulus with other stimuli of positive or negative valence. Because EC is considered the most prototypical method to form and change the network of evaluative associations in memory, the role of awareness in this effect is critical to the question of whether attitudes may be formed and changed through dual processes. We analyze the reasons why there has been so much discussion and disagreement regarding the role of awareness, review past and contemporary methodologies and their limitations, discuss the role of mental processes and conditioning procedures, and identify promising directions for future research in this area.

A rich tradition in self-control research has documented the negative consequences of exerting self-control in one task for self-control performance in subsequent tasks. However, there is a dearth of research examining what happens when people exert self-control in multiple domains simultaneously. The current research aims to fill this gap. We integrate predictions from the most prominent models of self-control with recent neuropsychological insights in the human inhibition system to generate the novel hypothesis that exerting effortful self-control in one task can simultaneously improve self-control in completely unrelated domains. An internal meta-analysis on all 18 studies we conducted shows that exerting self-control in one domain (i.e., controlling attention, food consumption, emotions or thoughts) simultaneously improves self-control in a range of other domains, as demonstrated by, for example, reduced unhealthy food consumption, better Stroop task performance, and less impulsive decision making. A subset of nine studies demonstrates the crucial nature of task timing -when the same tasks are executed sequentially, our results suggest the emergence of an ego depletion effect. We provide conservative estimates of the self-control facilitation (d = |0.22|) as well as the ego depletion effect size (d = |0.17|) free of data selection and publication biases. These results (i) shed new light on self-control theories, (ii) confirm recent claims that previous estimates of the ego depletion effect size were inflated due to publication bias, and (iii) provide a blueprint for how to handle the power issues and associated file drawer problems commonly encountered in multi-study research projects.

Recent research has shown that evaluative conditioning (EC) procedures can change attitudes without participants' awareness of the contingencies between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli (Hütter, Sweldens, Stahl, Unkelbach, & Klauer, 2012). We present a theoretical explanation and boundary condition for the emergence of unaware EC effects based on the implicit misattribution of evaluative responses from unconditioned to conditioned stimuli. We hypothesize that such misattribution is only possible when conditioned and unconditioned stimuli are perceived simultaneously. Therefore we manipulate the simultaneity of the stimulus presentations and apply a process dissociation procedure to distinguish contingency-aware from contingency-unaware EC effects. A multinomial model indicates that with sequential presentations, EC effects do not occur without contingency awareness. However, unaware EC effects do occur with simultaneous presentations. The findings support dual-process theories of learning.

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AND KEYWORDS AbstractContrary to predictions based on cognitive accessibility, heightened gender identity salience resulted in lower perceived vulnerability and reduced donation behavior to identity-specific risks

Consumer research can benefit greatly from more insight in unconscious processes underlying behavior. Williams and Poehlman's effort at more clearly conceptualizing consciousness and call for more research provides a welcome stimulus in this regard. At the same time, providing evidence for unconscious causation is fraught with methodological difficulties. We outline why it is vital to uphold standards of evidence for claims regarding unconscious processes, as it is precisely a lack of rigor on this front which has generated a countermovement by researchers sceptical of dual process models in general and unconscious processes in particular. We contend that the sceptics have offered valid causes for concern, which we leverage to formulate six concrete recommendations for future research on consciousness. Researchers should (1) specify the process level at which they claim evidence for unconscious processes, (2) not confuse unconscious influences with unconscious processes, (3) carefully choose between different operational definitions of awareness, (4) maximally satisfy four criteria for awareness measures, and (5) complement measurement with experimental manipulations of awareness. Finally, we recommend to (6) refrain from hard claims about unconscious causation that transcend the limitations of the evidence, recognizing that consciousness is a continuous construct. Author NoteSteven Sweldens is associate professor of marketing at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands (sweldens@rsm.nl) and distinguished research fellow at INSEAD. Mirjam A. Tuk is assistant professor of marketing at Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2AZ, UK (m.tuk@imperial.ac.uk) and visiting professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Mandy Hütter is junior professor of social psychology at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Fachbereich Psychologie, Schleichstr. 4, 72076 Tübingen, Germany (mandy.huetter@uni-tuebingen.de). 2To better understand, aid and protect consumers, it is imperative to have an accurate understanding of unconscious drivers of behavior. We therefore welcome Williams and Poehlman's (2016) effort to stimulate and more clearly conceptualize the study of consciousness in consumer research. Past research on consciousness has struggled with two major stumbling blocks. First, it is difficult to provide an accurate definition of consciousness, not least because we do not really know how the experience of consciousness originates. As a consequence, there has been much variation in how conscious versus unconscious processing have been defined and operationalized in past research. We believe Williams and Poehlman (WP) have made important progress here by restricting the definition of consciousness to awareness, highlighting its functions and distinguishing it from other features of automaticity. Second, even when researchers agree on a definition (e.g., "awareness"),...