What is the effective conditioned stimulus? Investigating the external validity of evaluative conditioning for social attitudes

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a social-cognitive research paradigm that is claimed to serve as an experimental analogue for the acquisition of attitudes towards individuals and groups. Previous research has challenged this claim by showing that the EC effect in facial stimuli is disrupted when a single feature of a face is altered. As the external validity of research paradigms is vital when generalizing findings from an experiment to the social world, the present research reconsiders this previous work in three experiments. Using faces as conditioned stimuli, we demonstrate that neither changes in viewing angle (Experiments 1 and 2), nor changes in features of the conditioned face (Experiment 3) disrupt the EC effect. The present experiments thus demonstrate that attitude acquisition by means of EC procedures generalizes to novel instances of the conditioned stimulus, signifying the adaptive value of EC effects in preparing behavior. Moreover, the present work suggests that conclusions drawn from this research paradigm can be applied to the acquisition of social attitudes.