Implicit Acquisition And Manifestation Of Classically Conditioned Attitudes

Evidence for the implicit formation of attitudes via classical conditioning was sought using a recently developed conditioning procedure (Olson & Fazio, 2001) and a subliminal priming technique as the dependent measure. Under the guise of an experiment purportedly about attention and vigilance for target events, participants viewed a series of random images and words interspersed with pairings of novel objects (CSs) and valenced words or images (USs). They were then submitted to an evaluative priming procedure in which the CSs were presented as primes for sub-threshold durations. Conditioning was evident in that participants responded more quickly to target words whose valence matched that of the USs that had been earlier paired with the now subliminally-primed CS.