Mandy Hütter

University of Tübingen | EKU Tübingen · Department of Psychology

Previous research into the influence of postconditioning revaluation of unconditioned stimuli (USs) on evaluative conditioning (EC) effects produced inconsistent results. One potential factor determining the sensitivity of EC to US revaluation is whether conditioned stimuli (CSs) get linked to valence (stimulus-valence learning) or the specific USs...

Our understanding of impression formation comes from experiments constraining participants’ control over information sampling. This limits our understanding of how people sample information when forming impressions as well as the effects of self-generated samples on impressions. Our paradigm allows participants to actively collect information sampl...

People’s attitudes toward almost any stimulus (e.g., brands, people, food items) can change in line with the valence of co-occurring stimuli (e.g., images, messages, other people), a phenomenon known as the evaluative conditioning (EC) effect. Recent research has shown that EC effects are not always controlled, which is problematic in many circumst...

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally inherent stereotypes, cloud moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups. Previous explanations mainly attributed bias in LLMs to human annotators and the selection of training data. Consequently, they have typically been addressed with...

Background: Overeating and obesity have been linked to deficient self-control and recent evidence suggests that the inhibitory spillover effect (ISE) may be an effective means to improve self-control. Specifically, it was shown that the ISE increases self-control by transfer of self-control capacity from one domain to another unrelated domain. Agai...

OBJECTIVE: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has surged in popularity with the implementation of interactive conversational interfaces. The possibility to engage in natural conversations with GenAI thus constitutes a promising countermeasure to algorithm aversion, or the general preference for advice from humans over advice from algorithms...

Advice taking and related research is dominated by deterministic weighting indices, specifically ratio‐of‐differences‐based formulas for investigating informational influence. Their arithmetic is intuitively simple, but they pose several measurement problems and restrict research to a particular paradigmatic approach. As a solution, we propose to s...

Recent work incorporating autonomy into an evaluative conditioning procedure provided evidence of a sampling decision effect in which high-autonomy participants positively shifted their evaluations of frequently sampled conditioned stimuli (CSs), regardless of whether they were consistently paired with positive or negative unconditioned stimuli (US...

Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in s...

Remembering events coherently requires the binding of their constituting elements in episodic memory. Considering various demonstrations of social motives influencing cognition and preliminary evidence for a facilitating effect of social status on associative memory, we investigated whether social status influences binding processes in episodic mem...

People often have some degree of choice over the stimuli they sample and learn more about. These sampling decisions can play an important role in evaluative learning, with recent work showing that sampling a stimulus more frequently predicts a positive shift in its evaluation (Hütter et al., 2022). The current work suggests sampling does not merely...

Objective: Overweight and obesity are global problems with negative physical, social, and psychological outcomes. Besides other factors, inhibitory control deficits contribute to weight gain and development of overweight. The inhibitory spillover effect (ISE) improves inhibitory control through transfer of inhibitory control capacity from one doma...

Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental as...

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity-variation...

The investigation of how social distance affects psychological phenomena has relied mostly on comparisons between strangers and acquaintances. Such an operationalization suffers from a confound between social distance and acquaintance. We propose an experimental paradigm that manipulates social distance while avoiding the aforementioned confound. B...

Overweight and obesity are global problems with negative physical, social, and psychological outcomes. Besides easily accessible food, low physical activity, and automatic responses to food, inhibitory control deficits contribute to weight gain and development of overweight. The inhibitory spillover effect (ISE) improves inhibitory control through...

In sampling approaches to advice taking, participants can sequentially sample multiple pieces of advice before making a final judgment. To contribute to the understanding of active advice seeking, we develop and compare different strategies for information integration from external sources, including Bayesian belief updating. In a reanalysis of emp...

Advice taking and related research are dominated by deterministic weighting indices such as ratio-of-differences-based formulas for investigating informational influence. They are intuitively simple but entail various measurement problems and restrict research to a certain paradigmatic approach. As a solution, we propose process-consistent mixed-ef...

Our current understanding of impression formation is based on experiments in which participants have no control over the information they receive. This limits the ecological realism of experimental situations upon which scientific claims are based. We present a research paradigm that gives participants control over the information search by allowin...

The present research addresses advice taking from a holistic perspective covering both advice seeking and weighting. We build on previous theorizing that assumes that underweighting of advice results from biased samples of information. That is, decision makers have more knowledge supporting their own judgment than that of another person and thus we...

Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlies processing in...

The present work examines whether the variability of attitude objects at attitude acquisition increases the generalization of likes and dislikes. In particular, variability might enhance the discriminative learning of cues, resulting in attitudes towards abstract entities rather than concrete instances. Using evaluative conditioning as an experimen...

Impaired inhibitory control is a core transdiagnostic mechanism in psychopathology. Directly targeting inhibitory control in intervention studies has, however, produced only little improvement. Recently, promising improvements in inhibitory control were shown by capitalizing on the inhibitory spillover effect (ISE). The central requirement of ISE i...

The co-occurrence of a person, object or concept and a valent stimulus can change how a person evaluates the person, object or concept. Such effects of stimulus pairings on attitudes have been investigated using an experimental paradigm called evaluative conditioning. According to dual-process views, two classes of learning mechanism are involved i...

Although new information technologies and social networks make a wide variety of opinions and advice easily accessible, one can never be sure to get support on a focal judgment task. Nevertheless, participants in traditional advice taking studies are by default informed in advance about the opportunity to revise their judgment in the light of advic...

Framing a choice in terms of gains versus losses can have a dramatic impact on peoples' decisions, sometimes completely reversing their choices. This decision-framing effect is often assumed to stem from individuals' inherent motivational biases to react more strongly to negative information. However, more recent work suggests these decision biases...

While most evaluative learning paradigms remove participants’ autonomy over the information they receive, other research traditions have demonstrated that information sampling has an important role in learning. We investigate the impact of information sampling on a central evaluative learning paradigm: evaluative conditioning. We compare a traditio...

Charles E. Osgood's theory of affective meaning defines affect as interplay of three meaning dimensions – evaluation, potency, and activity – that represent the central constituents of our affective ecology. Based on a rigorous Brunswikian sampling procedure, we selected a representative set of stimuli that mirror this ecology. A germane informativ...

Previous research has provided ample evidence for an impact of language on moral dilemma judgments, suggesting higher willingness to sacrifice one person to save several others when the dilemma is presented in a foreign as opposed to the judge’s native language. In accordance with the dual-process model of moral judgment, the foreign language effec...

Most people in industrialized countries regularly purchase products online. Consumers often rely on previous customers' reviews to make purchasing decisions. The current research investigates whether potential online customers select these reviews in a biased way and whether typical interface properties of product evaluation portals foster biased s...

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel concept...

Product evaluation portals on the web that collect product ratings provide an excellent opportunity to observe opinion sharing in a natural setting. Evidence across different paradigms shows that minority opinions are shared less than majority opinions. This article reports a study testing whether this effect holds on product evaluation portals. We...

The CNI model of moral decision-making is a formal model that quantifies (1) sensitivity to consequences, (2) sensitivity to moral norms, and (3) general preference for inaction versus action in responses to moral dilemmas. Based on a critique of the CNI model's conceptual assumptions, properties of the moral dilemmas for research using the CNI mod...

Much advice taking research investigates whether advice weighting accords to normative principles for maximizing decision accuracy. The present research complements this normative perspective with an interpersonal one, arguing that judges should also pay attention to how much their advisors want them to weight advice. In four experiments, we found...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is one of the most widely-studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance-task (Olson & Fazio, 2001) is a highly cited EC paradigm, and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for EC effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretic...

This article provides a comprehensive review of divergent conceptualizations of the "implicit" construct that have emerged in attitude research over the past two decades. In doing so, our goal is to raise awareness of the harmful consequences of conceptual ambiguities associated with this terminology. We identify three main conceptualizations of th...

Recent research into evaluative conditioning (EC) shows that information about the relationship between the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli can exert strong effects on the size and direction of the EC effect. Additionally, the co-occurrence of these stimuli seems to exert an orthogonal effect on evaluations. This finding has been interpreted...

This special issue of Cognition and Emotion assembles recent advances in theorizing and empirical research on the automaticity of evaluative learning. Based on a taxonomy of automatic processes in evaluative learning, we distinguish between processes that are involved in translating evaluative experiences into evaluative mental representations (acq...

Previous research has shown that approaching a stimulus makes it more positive, while avoiding a stimulus makes it more negative. The present research demonstrates that approach-avoidance behaviors have the potential to charge stimulus attributes such as color with evaluative meaning. This evaluation carries over to other stimuli with that feature....

We investigate the psychological bases underlying moral dilemma judgment with the help of multinomial processing tree modeling, and consider how determinants of dilemma judgment should best be conceptualized. We argue that, for conceptual as well as empirical reasons, norms and consequences should be considered as more intimately linked with one an...

When presented with neutral stimuli (i.e., CSs) paired with valent ones (i.e., USs), individuals may prove unable to fully reverse the influence of the US on the impression they form about the CS. In a high-powered, pre-registered experiment, we revisited this uncontrollable EC effect in the context of an instruction-based EC procedure. Specificall...

A major module of rational advice taking consists in the metacognitive ability to distinguish between credible advice and arbitrary anchors. Accordingly, we investigated the extent to which framing the very same information as either advice or anchor exerts a differential influence on quantitative judgments. Four experiments showed that although ar...

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 externa...

Previous research on advice taking has explained the failure to exploit collective wisdom in terms of the egocentric underweighting of advice provided by independent others. The present research is concerned with an opposite and more radical source of irrational advice taking, namely, the failure to critically assess the validity of advice due to m...

This research tested a central assumption of attitudinal ambivalence research: ambivalent attitude objects simultaneously trigger positive and negative evaluations. It further specifies at which stage this activation is likely to produce an evaluative conflict. Experiments 1 to 3 involved two evaluative priming paradigms, in which ambivalent stimul...

Evaluative conditioning (EC), a change in liking of a stimulus due to its paired presentation with a positive or negative stimulus, is a key concept in attitude formation. The present article examines to what extent EC effects are moderated by Big Five personality. For this purpose, 567 participants completed an EC procedure and the Big Five Invent...

This research studies a fundamental and seemingly straightforward question: can basic advertising elements such as the presence of attractive imagery have uncontrollable effects on consumers’ attitudes and consumption decisions? Answering this question is methodologically challenging, because the presence of an uncontrollable process can be masked...

The role of awareness in evaluative learning has been thoroughly investigated with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. We investigated evaluative conditioning (EC) without awareness with an approach that conceptually provides optimal conditions for unaware learning - the Continuous Flash Suppression paradigm (CFS). In CFS, a sti...

Effects of incidental emotions on moral dilemma judgments have garnered interest because they demonstrate the context-dependent nature of moral decision-making. Six experiments (N = 727) investigated the effects of incidental happiness, sadness, and anger on responses in moral dilemmas that pit the consequences of a given action for the greater goo...

Research that dissociates different types of processes within a given task using a processing tree approach suggests that attitudes may be acquired through evaluative conditioning in the absence of explicit encoding of CS-US pairings in memory. This research distinguishes explicit memory for the CS-US pairings from CS-liking acquired without encodi...

Research on moral dilemma judgments has been fundamentally shaped by the distinction between utilitarianism and deontology. According to the principle of utilitarianism, the moral status of behavioral options depends on their consequences; the principle of deontology states that the moral status of behavioral options depends on their consistency wi...

Consumer research can benefit greatly from more insight in unconscious processes underlying behavior. Williams and Poehlman's effort at more clearly conceptualizing consciousness and call for more research provides a welcome stimulus in this regard. At the same time, providing evidence for unconscious causation is fraught with methodological diffic...

We investigated whether instructions have the potential to generate memory-independent attitude acquisition as indexed by a stochastic model of evaluative conditioning that distinguishes between memory-dependent and memory-independent learning. For that purpose, we instructed participants about pairings of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli with...

In three experiments, we investigated how preventing the explicit encoding of conditioned stimulus–unconditioned stimulus (CS–US) pairings by imposing a secondary task at learning influences evaluative conditioning (EC) effects in a paradigm claimed to be conducive to implicit EC. We additionally used a multinomial processing tree model to examine...

To understand the impact of social cognition on behavior, it is essential to understand how attitudes are acquired, updated, and mapped onto judgments, decisions, and actions. Evaluative conditioning (EC) affords an experimental model of a particular procedural notion of attitude acquisition and change. The present editorial offers an overview of p...

Processing tree models offer a powerful research framework by which the contributions of cognitive processes to a task can be separated and quantified. The present article reviews a number of applications of processing tree models in the domain of social psychology in order to illustrate the steps to be taken in developing and validating a given mo...

The present research addresses advice taking from a holistic perspective covering both advice seeking and weighting. We build on previous theorizing that assumes that underweighting of advice results from skewed samples of information. That is, decision makers have more knowledge supporting their own judgment than that of another person and thus we...

Changing attitudes by repeated co-occurrences of initially neutral (conditioned) stimuli with affective entities (unconditioned stimuli) is called evaluative conditioning. The vast majority of evaluative conditioning procedures in the literature are ‘forward’ in nature, presenting the conditioned stimulus before the unconditioned stimulus. Scant em...

The first principle, often associated with the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, emphasizes the irrevocable universality of rights and duties. According to the principle of deontology, the moral status of an action is derived from its consistency with context-independent norms. One of the most prominent examples of such theories is Greene's dual-p...

Detecting changes, in performance, sales, markets, risks, social relations, or public opinions, constitutes an important adaptive function. In a sequential paradigm devised to investigate detection of change, every trial provides a sample of binary outcomes (e.g., correct vs. incorrect student responses). Participants have to decide whether the pro...

The investigation of evaluative conditioning (EC) has been mainly concerned with the conditioning of individual stimuli. Namely, a specific conditioned stimulus (CS) is paired with a positive or negative unconditioned stimulus and consequently acquires the valence of the unconditioned stimulus. In the present article, we expand the notion of EC to...

Recent research has shown that evaluative conditioning (EC) procedures can change attitudes without participants' awareness of the contingencies between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli (Hütter, Sweldens, Stahl, Unkelbach, & Klauer, 2012). We present a theoretical explanation and boundary condition for the emergence of unaware EC effects based...

Whether human evaluative conditioning can occur without contingency awareness has been the subject of an intense and ongoing debate for decades, troubled by a wide array of methodological difficulties. Following recent methodological innovations, the available evidence currently points to the conclusion that evaluative conditioning effects do not o...

Team diversity may lead to a categorization of teammates as ingroup versus outgroup members. Therefore, the question arises whether there would be more permissiveness in reaction to ingroup free-riders than outgroup free-riders. To test this hypothesis, subjects were randomly assigned to one of two reward conditions (equity versus equality) and had...

Reports an error in "Conditional reasoning in context: A dual-source model of probabilistic inference" by Karl Christoph Klauer, Sieghard Beller and Mandy Hütter (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2010[Mar], Vol 36[2], 298-323). In the article “Conditional Reasoning in Context: A Dual-Source Model of Probabilistic...

A dual-source model of probabilistic conditional inference is proposed. According to the model, inferences are based on 2 sources of evidence: logical form and prior knowledge. Logical form is a decontextualized source of evidence, whereas prior knowledge is activated by the contents of the conditional rule. In Experiments 1 to 3, manipulations of...

Die Evaluative Konditionierung bezeichnet das Phänomen, dass Einstellungen durch die gemeinsame Präsentation von Stimuli unterschiedlicher Valenz gelernt oder modifiziert werden können. Kann dabei ein Stimulus den anderen verlässlich vorhersagen, besteht eine statistische Kontingenz zwischen diesen Stimuli. Seit Jahren besteht eine Kontroverse um d...