Attitude formation through exploration: Valence asymmetries

The formation of attitudes toward novel objects was examined as a function of exploratory behavior. An initial experiment, in which participants played a computer game that required them to learn which stimuli, when sampled, produced favorable or unfavorable outcomes, demonstrated learning, attitude formation, and generalization to novel objects. The findings also revealed 2 interesting valence asymmetries: a learning asymmetry involving better learning for negatively valenced than positively valenced objects and a generalization asymmetry involving stronger generalization as a function of negative than of positive attitudes. Findings from 4 experiments led to an explanation of the learning asymmetry in terms of information gain being contingent on approach behavior and related the generalization asymmetry to a negativity bias that weighs resemblance to a known negative more heavily than resemblance to a positive.