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. 2004 Sep;87(3):293-311.
doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.87.3.293.

Attitude formation through exploration: valence asymmetries

Russell H Fazio  1 , J Richard Eiser  2 , Natalie J Shook  1
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Attitude formation through exploration: valence asymmetries

Russell H Fazio et al. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2004 Sep.

Abstract

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.

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