Investigating the basic principles of affective learning II. The acquistion of valent motor reactions.

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Christian Frings; Professorin Dr. Eva Walther
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448481153

Attitudes are of high importance, as they are seen as a predictor of behavior. People approach objects, individuals and events they like and avoid those they dislike. The relationship between attitudes and behavior has been studied so far primarily from four research directions: First, attitudes and especially their acquisition have been studied more or less independently of actions. Thus, in evaluative learning the focus is on the formation and not on the (behavioral) consequences of newly acquired attitudes. Another approach considers attitudes as a precondition of behavior; from a third research perspective in the context of dissonance theory (Festinger, 1958), attitudes are regarded as a consequence of behavior. If behavior inconsistent to attitudes takes place, the attitude should change in order to reduce dissonance. Fourth, attitudes are changed by their behavioral consequences (i.e., reward/punishment) (Insko, 1965). A new perspective on the interplay between attitudes and action emerges from recent theories on action control, in which close relationships between attention, learning and action are assumed. Based on this perspective, an overlapping encoding of - in the case of attitude learning - evaluative aspects of stimuli and action can be assumed. From this assumption, the theoretically new hypothesis can be derived that actions do not acquire evaluative connotations solely through operant reinforcement, but also through the overlapping encoding of evaluative stimulus and response patterns. Consequently, motor responses could acquire valence themselves (i.e., a positive or negative meaning), and transfer this valence to other actions or stimuli through conditioning. This perspective of the acquisition of valent motorical actions does not only provide new theoretical insights into the interplay of attitudes and behavior, but has also important implications, for example, for the formation of habits and the questions of how action is learned and stabilized in the first place. Moreover, this perspective allows new theorizing in the field of evaluative learning.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants