Abstract
Zajonc (1980) argued that, contrary to what is commonly believed, an affective judgment about a stimulus may be independent of the cognitive processes through which we know what that stimulus is. The evidence Zajonc offered (the exposure effect in the absence of recognition) does not entail this claim. An example of the sort of experiment that could do so is offered. When carried out, however, this study indicated the opposite: An affective judgment about a stimulus depended on how it was cognitively interpreted. We argue that what is commonly believed in this area is presumptively correct: Affective judgments about a stimulus depend on whatever information is possessed about that stimulus.
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This study was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are grateful to Eric Eich, Dan Kahneman, Del Paulhus, Anne Treisman, Auke Tellegen, and Larry Ward for their advice on matters discussed in this article, and to Liz McCririck for her patient help in preparing the manuscript. We are particularly grateful to R. B. Zajonc for his comments on a previous draft of this article.
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Russell, J.A., Woudzia, L. Affective judgments, common sense, and Zajonc's thesis of independence. Motiv Emot 10, 169–183 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992254
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992254