The Effect Of Self-referential Processing On Attitude Formation

Recently, Attitude is always the issue of psychological researches, and the internal mechanism of evaluative conditioning in attitude formation has widely received psychologists‘ attention. Based on previous researches, the ??self‘‘ and ??other‘‘ were used as unconditioned stimulus in this study to explore how self-referential processing influence the attitude formation toward two unknown domestic sports brands by evaluative conditioning. Furthermore, this study was aimed to probe the positivity and specificity of ??self‘‘ with being a effective unconditioned stimulus.There were two experiments to explore the effect of self-referential processing on attitude formation in this study. The experiment 1compared the EC effect of ??self‘‘ and ??other‘‘ when being the effective unconditioned stimulus in attitude formation. The experiment 2 further compared the EC effect of ??self‘‘ and ??positive other‘‘ when being the effective unconditioned stimulus in attitude formation.The experiment 1 showed that compared with the control group and the ??other+Jinhua‘‘ group, the participants in the ―self+Luyou‖ group had a greater implicit preference toward the sports brands ―Luyou‖, but there was no significant difference in explicit attitude among them. Compared with the control group, the participants in the ―other+Jinhua‖ group had no significant implicit and explicit preference toward the sports brands ―Jinhua‖. Moreover, the experiment 2 found that compared with the control group and the ―admired other+Jinhua‖ group, the participants in the ―self+Luyou‖ group still had a greater implicit preference toward the sports brands ―Luyou‖, but there was no significant difference in the implicit and explicit preference among them. Compared with the control group, the participants in the ―admired other+Jinhua‖ group had no significant implicit and explicit preference toward the sports brands ―Jinhua‖.Results showed that "self" could be an effective and positive unconditioned stimulus and had a significant EC effect in the implicit attitude formation compared to "others", even though in the situation where ―other‖ was defined as a specific and similar positive ??admired other‘‘. So ―self‖ was very positive and special in the formation of implicit attitude when it was an effective unconditioned stimulus, and thus it prompted people to form a significant implicit preference toward the neutral stimulus. In short, self-referential processing can affect the formation of implicit preferences. These Results preliminarily support the referential account toward EC effects.