An Investigation of the Mediational Mechanisms Underlying Attitudinal Conditioning

The authors examine the two principal mechanisms that have been proposed as possible explanations for the effects of classical conditioning procedures in attitude-shaping applications. They report two experiments that test conditioning procedures for prompting inferential beliefs, versus transferring affect, as means to influencing brand attitudes. Both studies use an established empirical paradigm for shaping brand attitudes with pictures or visual images as the unconditioned stimuli. The results indicate that brand attitudes can be conditioned using both attractive images that promote direct affect transfer and descriptive visual images that promote inferential belief formation. These data suggest that conditioning procedures can produce multiple benefits when they are applied in selecting and arranging the nonverbal cues to be featured in an advertising campaign.