Attribute Conditioning is insensitive to cue competition and is not predicted by the Big Five Personality Traits

Abstract

When a neutral stimulus is paired with a stimulus denoting an attribute, the neutral stimulus inherits that attribute (i.e., Attribute Conditioning; AC). The current experiments examined whether this effect is sensitive to cue competition, specifically blocking (Experiment 1, n = 245) and overshadowing (Experiment 2, n = 213), and whether personality traits can predict this effect (n = 458). Participants were shown cartoon images of people (CSs) paired with healthy or unhealthy foods (USs) and completed the Big Five Inventory. An AC effect was evident—people paired with healthy foods were rated healthier than people paired with unhealthy foods. However, there was no evidence of cue competition or personality traits impacting the AC effect, although females displayed a stronger AC effect than males. These findings indicate that AC is a robust phenomenon of relevance to social learning processes but is insensitive to factors that influence other forms of conditioning.