| Implicit attitude is an unconscious trace which is accumulated by previous experience and attitudes. This trace or its influence can't be aware of , but it can influence one's feeling for the attitude object , his cognition and his behavior. Since implicit attitude is a kind of " stereotype " , its influence is hard to eliminate. There is great significance to probe into the formation of implicit attitude.When one expresses some attitudinal tendency implicitly or explicitly, but he can't be aware of the attitude's origin, he forms implicit attitude.In 1958 Staats let the participants develop attitude towards the unmeaning syllables and country names unconsciously, which became the basic paradigm to form attitude via classic conditioning. The paradigm included two stages: conditioning stage and rating stage. In the conditioning stage, experimenter present the pairing of conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (UCS) to the participants so that they could form attitude towards CS. In the rating stage, experimenter measured the participants' attitude and tested their awareness in conditioning stage. In this paradigm the " implicit state" was defined operatively as: (1) the participants were not aware of the regularity of the pairing of CS and UCS (contingency) (2) the participants believed in the "cover story" and were not aware of the true aim of the experiment.With the accumulation of the experimental results, research discovered many defect when they repeated Staats' paradigm. In spite of their unceasing improvement there is still controversy on whether implicit attitude can be developed via classic conditioning. Some researchers (Orne, 1962,1970; Cohen,1964; Page, 1964,1969; Field, 1998,2000) believed that the participants' attitude was due to that they had detected the demand characteristics of the contingency but not the result of classic conditioning, that is , the participants couldn't form implicit attitude through classical conditioning. Other researchers ( Zanna,1970; Levin&Martin,1975; Beayens,1990; Cacioppo,1992 ) believed participants could develop implicit attitude through classical conditioning.Olson M.A. and Fazio R.H. (2001) used the implicit learning paradigm for reference. They used the "cover story" and modified the .presentation pattern of CS andUCS to ensure that the paradigm (1) have minimal likelihood of promoting either demand characteristics or contingency awareness on the part of participants and ( 2) capture the real word's tendency to present natural covariations between CS and UCS. The series of their experiments proved implicit attitude can be developed via classical conditioning.The goal of the present research is to test the efficacy of classical conditioning in forming implicit attitude using different attitude measuring means. Under Olson's paradigm, this research modifies the experimental materials and adds a control group as a basic line to be compared with other groups. This research uses the undergraduates who haven't experienced similar experiments and have normal sight and color sense as subjects. All the three experiments were programmed with Borland Delphi and Authorware 6.0 to control time and word presentation to carry out the experiments.This research includes three experiments which all consist of two stages: conditioning stage and rating stage. The experimental materials and procedure of the conditioning stage in the three experiments are the same. In the rating stage, three experiments use three different means respectively to test the efficacy of the formation of implicit attitude. Experiment 1 uses likert scale to measure the implicit attitude and the covariation estimation of CS-UCS pairing to test the subjects' awareness. Experiment 2 uses IAT (Implicit Association Test) to measure the implicit attitude and the funneled questionnaire to test the subjects' awareness. Experiment 3 uses subliminal priming technique. These three measuring means are concealing and perfect progressively, which verifies the efficacy of the... |
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