Generalization Versus Contextualization in Automatic Evaluation

Research has shown that automatic evaluations can be highly robust and difficult to change highly malleable and easy to change and highly context dependent We tested a representational account of these disparate findings which specifies the conditions under which automatic evaluations reflect (a) initially acquired information (b) subsequently acquired counterattitudinal information or (c) a mixture of both The account postulates that attention to contextual cues during the encoding of evaluative information determines whether this information is stored in a context free representation or a contextualized representation To the extent that attention to context cues is low during the encoding, of initial information but is enhanced by exposure to expectancy violating counterattitudinal information initial experiences are stored in context free representations whereas counter attitudinal experiences are stored in contextualized representations Hence automatic evaluations tend to reflect the valence of counter attitudinal information only in the context in which this information was learned (occasion setting) and the valence of initial experiences in any other context (renewal effect) Four experiments confirmed these predictions additionally showing, that (a) the Impact of initial experiences was reduced for automatic evaluations in novel contexts when context salience during the encoding of initial information was enhanced (b) context effects were eliminated altogether when context salience during the encoding of counterattitudinal information was reduced and (c) enhanced context silence during the encoding of counterattitudinal information produced context dependent automatic evaluations even when there was no contingency between valence and contextual cues Implications for automatic evaluation learning theory and interventions in applied settings are discussed