This Week's Seminar:

Can repeated pairings with affective valence lead to an evaluative change in real-world contexts?
Tal Moran, The Open University of Israel

The idea that our evaluations of people and objects are shaped by their pairing with affective stimuli is central in psychology research. We can see applications of this idea in advertising, product designs, and health campaigns. The effect of pairing an object with a valenced stimulus on the evaluation of the object is called the Evaluative Conditioning (EC) effect. In this talk, I will overview a few of my research projects that explore whether repeated pairings with affective valence can lead to an evaluative change in real-world contexts. I will present the results of a meta-analysis testing whether EC procedures (i.e., exposure to the repeated pairing of an object with affective stimuli) are effective as interventions to modify evaluations and their linked problematic or desirable behaviors. The meta-analysis found a small significant effect that might be overestimated due to publication bias, considerable heterogeneity, and some significant moderators related to the measured outcome. Then, I will present new lines of research testing a learning paradigm that combines the idea of the significance of morality in intergroup relations with the idea of repeated learning episodes as a tool for fighting hostile intergroup relations. I will show initial results suggesting that such a moral learning treatment can reduce affective polarization in the U.S. context and prejudice in the Israeli context.