How much are you controlling?

Imagine a situation in which your friend is bothering you with how much she hates her chemistry professor, who you will have next semester. Imagine you had not met this professor yet, however, based on the information you already have, would you like or dislike her? Naturally most people’s first inclination would be to have a sense of dread towards having this teacher next semester. Why does this happen? After all you don’t know anything about this professor. Researchers at the University of Trier in Germany recently published a psychological study titled “The Role of Evaluative Conditioning in Attitude Formation”. In this post, I will summarize the methods and conclusions of this study.

In social psychology, it is widely known that the attitudes of other people can persuade one’s thoughts and even actions. This is illustrated in a famous study by Solomon Asch published in the 1950’s, where he asked participants to say which of three lines drawn on a notecard was the longest. He would go down a line of 10 participants and each would give their answer. The answer in this case is very obvious and takes no skill or critical thinking. The trick was that the first 9 participants were actually part of the study and purposefully all answered with the same wrong answer. Asch found that in most cases, the final participant who was the real participant would incorrectly answer the question to conform with the others even though they knew that it was incorrect.

The difference that the current study is trying to impose is that the influence of attitudes can also be affected by Evaluative Conditioning or also known as “Classical Conditioning” Classical conditioning is a simple psychological idea made famous by Ivan Pavlov. I'm sure most everybody has heard of Pavlov’s dogs. This type of conditioning is a way that influences ones behavior. It involves pairing a stimulus such as a bell to a response such as food. After you ring a bell and present food along with it so many times, every time the bell rings, you will start expecting food. That is classical conditioning at is simplest level. In the current study, the subjects will be presented a neutral human face. Then one group will presented a mad face directly afterward. And the other group would be presented a sad face. Later when the same subjects are presented with a neutral face, the people in the mad group rate the neutral face as being mad and vice versa with the sad group. This is supposed to illustrate how other people’s attitudes can effect your own attitude. But in this case instead of conforming, the mechanism of influence is a type of classical conditioning.

So then according to this study, the previous case presented in the introduction about the chemistry professor would be a influence by the mechanism of conditioning rather than conformity. This study suggests that our friends negative thoughts and emotions are paired with the chemistry teacher thus to produce a conditioned negative attitude towards the thought of our chemistry teacher. This is not good because negative attitudes can also be known to affect productivity and or effective learning. So it is crazy to think that the fact that your friend talking about how they hate their chemistry teacher could in fact effect your performance in your class next semester and cause you to do more poorly than you should have. How selfish of her right? But what can you do, this all happens naturally as a part of human instinct that has evolved to keep us alive. This idea of behavior modification through conditioning is a sort of grim idea in the sense that we may not have full control over our behavior and thus not have full control over our future. Maybe we should pay attention to our lives more closely to make sure we are seeing things through our own eyes and behaving not on the behalf of others.