Study Of Evaluative Conditioning And The Influence On Attitude

At the global level, environmental problems are driven by two forces:an ever-increasing human population and an ever increasing desire for more material goods. Merely viewing desirable consumer goods result in increases in materialistic concerns and can lead to relatively low levels of well-being. In addition to subjective well-being, materialism is likely to be related also to dysfunctional consumer behavior that has serious negative consequences for individuals:debt, distress, and impairment. This dysfunctional behavior can come to dominate individuals’lives to such an extent that it has to be considered a clinical disorder. There is an urgent need to intern in this situation.This paper is divided into three parts:Part Ⅰ:Review. Frist, related concepts of consumerism, sustainable consume, recycling is defined; Next, the dual-process theory, Associative-propositional Evaluation (APE), Evaluative Conditioning (EC), Implicit Association Test(IAT) will be introduced. Finally, previous research results are reviewed and a simple comment has been made.Part Ⅱ:Empirical research. The method of this paper is psychology experimental method. Fifty-two undergraduates participated in a between-subjects experiment, a complete randomized design, that included a Evaluative Conditioning task and a Implicit Association Test task and a Virtual supermarket task. In the experiment, there are one experimental group and one control groups in the participators. Experimental results of this design are processed with independent sample T-test.The present study will examine whether implicit measures of associations with consumerism and sustainable consume behavior will be changed through a picture-picture evaluative conditioning procedure. In the experimental condition (n=31), participants need complete a conditioning procedure in which pictures of consumerism are paired with unpleasant pictures, and pictures of recycling are paired with pleasant pictures. For participants in the control condition the CS-US pairings are random so that both the consumerism and recycling stimuli are followed by pictures of pleasant pictures(positively valenced)(50%) and unpleasant pictures(negatively valenced)(50%). This procedure is repeated for144trials.Implicit measures of associations with consumerism and recycling will be obtained by using a tradition Implicit Association Test (IAT). IAT consisted of seven blocks,"recycling" and "consumerism" are attribute concepts,"good" and "bad" are target concepts. D score, often referred to as the IAT effect, is based on latencies for two tasks that differ in instructions for using two response keys to classify four categories of stimuli.In the virtual supermarket task, the paper will examine whether behavioral choice of participants in the experimental and control conditions will be different.Part Ⅲ:Discussion and Conclusion. The transformation of associative evaluations into propositions that may or may not be consciously endorsed explains how a change of implicit attitudes may contribute to a change in explicit attitudes. The crucial point for the current discussion is that a change of implicit attitudes may result in an indirect change of explicit attitudes, and vice versa. These results imply that this form of associative learning can produce shifts in implicit measures of consumerism evaluations, though behavioral effects were absent.