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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Oct 26, 2025

The Modified Temptation Resistance Task: A Paradigm to Elicit Children's Strategic Lie-telling

The Modified Temptation Resistance Task: A Paradigm to Elicit Children's Strategic Lie-telling

Published on: April 6, 2018

Attitudes as propositional representations.

Jan De Houwer¹, Pieter Van Dessel¹, Tal Moran¹

¹Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

|August 3, 2021

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Attitudes are mental representations influencing responses. New research shows attitudes are propositional, not just associations, impacting behavior like alcohol intake and racial bias.

Keywords:

associations attitudes evaluations evaluative conditioning implicit evaluation propositional representations

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Last Updated: Oct 26, 2025

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Social Psychology

Background:

Attitudes, mental representations of stimuli, explain positive/negative responses.
Historically viewed as memory associations, influencing research on evaluative conditioning (EC) and implicit evaluation.
An alternative perspective views attitudes as propositional representations with relational information and truth values.

Purpose of the Study:

To review research on EC and implicit evaluation through the lens of the propositional attitude perspective.
To assess if relational and truth information moderates EC and implicit evaluation.

Main Methods:

Literature review of studies examining EC and implicit evaluation.
Analysis of how relational and truth information impacts these phenomena.

Main Results:

Research findings support the propositional perspective on attitudes.
Both EC and implicit evaluation are shown to be moderated by relational and truth information.
This perspective offers insights into seemingly irrational behaviors.

Conclusions:

Attitudes are better understood as propositional representations rather than simple associations.
This understanding has implications for predicting and influencing behaviors like excessive alcohol consumption and implicit racial bias.