Judgment and learning

Abstract

How may such notions be squared with the suggestion that some attitude-relevant responses at least may be seen as the product of conditioning? There is no basic contradiction. Theories of both judgment and learning describe relationships between environmental stimuli on the one hand and behavior on the other. Both approaches (now) attempt to understand such relationships in terms of how the stimuli are subjectively represented. The approaches seem to diverge to the extent that judgment theorists, unlike learning theorists, tend to treat the responses they are interested in as consciously intended, whereas learning theorists are more likely to concern themselves as much with subjects’ representations of the expected consequences of a response as with their representations of the stimulus to which that response occurs.