Assessing the Role of Contingency Awareness in Attitudinal Conditioning with Implications for Advertising Research

The authors investigate a basic mechanism for shaping attitudes that has largely been ignored by empirical researchers in the marketing discipline. Two experiments are reported in which traditional Pavlovian procedures are merged with a view of conditioning that encourages theorizing about attendant cognitive processes. The data indicate that contingency learning or awareness may be a requirement for successful attitudinal conditioning. Contingency awareness entails conscious recognition of the relational pattern between the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli used in a conditioning procedure. In experiment 1, the conditioning procedure affected the evaluative judgments of subjects who were classified (post hoc) as contingency aware. In experiment 2, instructions that promoted contingency learning as part of the procedure again influenced participants’ attitude judgments. Implications are offered for theory development and for constructing advertisements to foster attitudinal conditioning. Specific suggestions for further research on how one might structure television commercials to foster contingency learning also are presented.