ABSTRACT

Attitudes are at the core of many topical issues, and a meeting point for research and discussion. This pervasiveness is not surprising given an attitude’s utility in reducing the complexity of the environment into relatively simple likes or dislikes of stimuli. How attitudes are formed is usually addressed by means of evaluative conditioning (EC). EC has been addressed from a traditional cognitive and a functional account. In this article, we present a different perspective on EC, which is situated in action control research. This perspective tries to take advantage of the strengths of both existing EC accounts by focusing on those cognitive processes that enjoy high levels of experimental control and that are necessary to explain how stimuli find their way into mental processing and ultimately into an evaluative response. Implications of this action control based account for EC research in specific and for attitude research in general are discussed.

摘要

态度是许多主题的核心，也是研究和讨论的契机。考虑到一种态度可以将环境的复杂性降低为相对简单的刺激或不喜欢，这种普遍性不足为奇。通常通过评估条件（EC）来解决态度的形成方式。EC已从传统的认知和功能描述中解决。在本文中，我们提出了关于EC的另一种观点，它位于动作控制研究中。这种观点试图通过将注意力集中在那些具有较高实验控制水平的认知过程上，从而充分利用现有EC账户的优势，这些认知过程对于解释刺激如何进入心理过程并最终进入评估反应是必不可少的。