Fluent Essays

Advertisers successfully use classical conditioning strategies to persuade consumers. Imagine that you are an advertising manager. For this Discussion, imagine the following scenario: You are the advertising manager at an agency that has been hired by a corporation preparing to launch a new product. Your assignment is to design an advertisement that promises to popularize the new product and ultimately boost the corporation’s profit margin. A national ad launch guarantees the new product will have wide visibility, putting pressure on you to deliver a message that will encourage consumers to purchase the product. For this Discussion, you will apply classical conditioning strategies to an ad campaign and analyze the formation of attitudes by classical conditioning.    To Prepare Review the Learning Resources for this week and consider classical conditioning strategies employed to create positive attitudes. Also, consider how advertisers employ classical conditioning strategies to increase the desirability of their products. Create a fictional product not yet on the market and design an advertisement (i.e., print, radio, television, or some other type of media ad) that uses classical conditioning strategies. Search the Internet for ideas to guide you as you design an advertisement.  Post a description of your fictional product and your advertisement. Describe the process by which classical conditioning creates favorable attitudes sufficient to encourage consumers to buy the product.   Required Readings (All attached)  Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., Akert, R. M., & Sommers, S. R. (Eds.). (2019). Social psychology (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Chapter 7, “Attitudes and Attitude Change: Influencing Thoughts and Feelings”   Staats, A. W., & Staats, C. K. (1958). Attitudes established by classical conditioning. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 57(1), 37–40. https://doiorg.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1037/h0042782   Levy, N., Harmon-Jones, C., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2018). Dissonance and discomfort: Does a simple cognitive inconsistency evoke a negative affective state? Motivation Science, 4(2), 95–108. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1037/mot0000079  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q1dv4a56e8ATTITUDES ESTABLISHED BY CLASSICAL CONDITIONING1 ARTHUR W. STAATS AND CAROLYN K. STAATS Arizona State College at Tempe O SGOOD and Tannenbaum have stated, ... The meaning of a concept is its location in a space denned by some number of factors or dimensions, and attitude toward a concept is its projection onto one of these dimensions defined as evaluative (9, p. 42). Thus, attitudes evoked by concepts are considered part of the total meaning of the concepts. A number of psychologists, such as Cofer and Foley (1), Mowrer (5), and Osgood (6, 7), to mention a few, view meaning as a response—an implicit response with cue functions which may mediate other responses. A very similar analysis has been made of the concept of attitudes by Doob, who states, An attitude is an implicit response . . . which is considered socially significant in the individuals society (2, p. 144). Doob further emphasizes the learned character of attitudes and states, The learning process, therefore, is crucial to an understanding of the behavior of attitudes (2, p. 138). If attitudes are to be considered responses, then the learning process should be the same as for other responses. As an example, the principles of classical conditioning should apply to attitudes. The present authors (12), in three experi- ments, recently conditioned the evaluative, potency, and activity components of word meaning found by Osgood and Suci (8) to contiguously presented nonsense syllables. The results supported the conception that meaning is a response and, further, indicated that word meaning is composed of components which can be separately conditioned. The present study extends the original experiments by studying the formation of attitudes (evaluative meaning) to socially significant verbal stimuli through classical con- ditioning. The socially significant verbal stimuli were national names and familiar masculine names. Both of these types of 1 This study is part of a series of studies of verbal behavior being conducted by the authors at Arizona State College at Tempe, The project is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (Contract Number NONR- 2305 (00)), Arthur W. Staats, principal investigator. stimuli, unlike nonsense syllables, would be expected to evoke attitudinal responses on the basis of the pre-experimental experience of the 5s. Thus, the purpose of the present study is to test the hypothesis that attitudes already elicited by socially significant verbal stimuli can be changed through classical conditioning, using other words as unconditioned stimuli. METHOD Subjects Ninety-three students in elementary psychology participated in the experiments as 5s to fulfill a course requirement. Procedure The general procedure employed was the same as in the previous study of the authors (12). Experiment I,—The procedures were administered to the 5s in groups. There were two groups with one half of the 5s in each group. Two types of stimuli were used: national naDissonance and Discomfort: Does a Simple Cognitive Inconsistency Evoke a Negative Affective State? Nicholas Levy, Cindy Harmon-Jones, and Eddie Harmon-Jones The University of New South Wales Festinger (1957) described cognitive dissonance as psychological discomfort that resulted from a cognitive inconsistency. Discussion of dissonance for the past 60 years has focused on the classic paradigms and the motivation to reduce dissonance, but some have noted that this represents a narrow application of Festinger’s ideas (Gawronski & Brannon, in press). Recent research has suggested, but not demonstrated, that simple cognitive inconsistencies may also evoke the affective and motivational state of dissonance (e.g., E. Harmon-Jones, Harmon-Jones, & Levy, 2015). In the current experiments, participants read sentences that ended with incongruent or congruent final words. In Study 1, sentences with incongruent endings led to more negative implicit affect than did sentences with congruent endings. Study 2 replicated this finding, with the addition of self-report and facial electromyography. These findings indicate that simple inconsistencies can evoke dissonance. Keywords: dissonance, consistency, emotion processing, implicit measures, affect Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance the- ory revolutionized the understanding of the re- lationships between cognitive, motivational, and affective processes. According to the orig- inal theory, “In the presence of an inconsistency there is psychological discomfort” (Festinger, 1957, p. 2). Inconsistency here refers to “non- fitting relations between cognitions” (Festinger, 1957, p. 3). Festinger, (1957) speculated that If a person were standing in the rain and yet could see no evidence that he was getting wet, these two cogni- tions would be dissonant with one another because he knows from experience that getting wet follows from being out in the rain. (p. 14) It is interesting to note that Festinger did not distinguish between dissonance as a relation between cognitions and dissonance as a moti- vational state of discomfort: “nonfitting rela- tions among cognitions [are] a motivating factor in [their] own right.” (Festinger, 1957, p. 3). In this light, Festinger’s example suggests even simple inconsistencies would cause dissonance discomfort. Although this theory and evidence (see below) suggest that a simple cognitive in- consistency should evoke psychological dis- comfort, no prior research has tested this di- rectly. Thus, the current research examined whether a simple cognitive inconsistency could evoke the psychological discomfort of disso- nance. Models of affect recognize that affective states are characterized by psychophysiological dimensions (e.g., Bradley, Greenwald, Petry, & Lang, 1992; Russell, 1980), including, but not limited to, affective valence (how pleasant or unpleasant an affective state is; E. Harmon- Jones, Harmon-Jones, Amodio, & Gable, 2011) and arousal (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2013)