The interplay of multiple unconditioned stimuli in evaluative conditioning: A weighted averaging framework for attitude formation via stimulus co-occurrences.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a key effect in attitude formation, leading to changes in the liking of neutral attitude objects due to their pairing with positive or negative stimuli. Despite EC's significance, current theories and most empirical findings are limited to stimulus pairings with a single affective stimulus at a time. In contrast, social environments often involve more complex combinations of affective stimuli.

Political rule (vs. opposition) predicts whether ideological prejudice is stronger in U.S. conservatives or progressives.

People see societal groups as less moral, warm, and likable if their ideology is more dissimilar to the ideology of the self (i.e., ideological prejudice).

The Formation of Negative Attitudes Toward Novel Groups.

People perceive out-groups, minorities, and novel groups more negatively than in-groups, majorities, and familiar groups. Previous research has argued that such intergroup biases may be caused by the order in which people typically encounter social groups. Groups that are relatively novel to perceivers (e.

Differentiation in social perception: Why later-encountered individuals are described more negatively.

According to the cognitive-ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from earlier-encountered persons.

Who shows the Unlikelihood Effect - and why?

Recent work shows that people judge an outcome as less likely when they learn the probabilities of all single pathways that lead to that outcome, a phenomenon termed the Unlikelihood Effect. The initial explanation for this effect is that the low pathway probabilities trigger thoughts that deem the outcome unlikely. We tested the alternative explanation that the effect results from people's erroneous interpretation and processing of the probability information provided in the paradigm.