Evaluative

Evaluative

it should be a reflective paper about the article I’ve attached. and here is the instructions: 1-2 pages max. in APA format) for each article that reflects upon the material read. Each RP must include a 1) brief summary of the article; 2) brief summary of the method used in the article; and, 3) own position/opinion.

 

ARTICLE TO USE

CAN EVALUATIVE CONDITIONING CHANGE IMPLICIT ATTITUDES TOWARDS RECYCLING?

We examined whether or not implicit attitudes towards recycling and recycling behavior can be changed through evaluative conditioning. In the experimental condition, pictures depicting recycling were paired with pleasant images, and pictures depicting consumerism were paired with unpleasant images. In the control condition, recycling and consumerism stimuli were randomly paired with pleasant and unpleasant images. Implicit attitudes were measured using the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). A virtual shopping task was used to assess recycling behavior. Participants in the experimental condition had more positive associations with recycling than did those in the control condition, but no behavioral differences were found between the two groups. These results suggest that evaluative conditioning procedures can produce changes in implicit attitudes towards recycling, but do not influence recycling behavior.

Liuna Geng, Lijuan Liu, and Jiayao Xu, Department of Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University; Kexin Zhou and Ying Fang, Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, Ministry of Environmental Protection. This study was supported by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions and the Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science Project of China (10YJCXLX009). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Kexin Zhou, Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, Ministry of Environmental Protection, 8 Jiangwangmiao Street, Xuanwu District, Nanjing 210042, People’s Republic of China. Email: zkx@nies.org
IMPLICIT RECYCLING ATTITUDES948 Many researchers have indicated that resource shortage problems cannot be ignored at the global level (Nickerson, 2003; Oskamp, 2000; Vlek & Steg, 2007). The severity of these problems has moved to the forefront of worldwide concern (Vlek & Steg, 2007). Researchers have demonstrated that two forces drive resource shortage: continuing growth of the human population and the constantly increasing desire for more material goods (Bandura, 2002; Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2002; Swim et al., 2010). It is not only environmental scientists, ecologists, and demographers who are concerned about resource shortage problems; these issues have also triggered the interest of psychologists. The study of attitudes is a core topic in social psychology. Attitudes can be viewed as object-evaluation associations in memory and are usually considered a synthesis of cognition, emotion, and behaviors (Fazio, 2007). Resource shortage is closely related to the welfare of human beings, because proenvi- ronmental attitudes can promote specific actions that protect the environment and save resources (Best & Kneip, 2011). Such actions are effective interventions to temper the ever-increasing desire for more material goods and can be radically effective in solving resource shortage problems. Of the many proenvironmental behaviors, recycling has the most direct influence on these problems (Osbaldiston & Schott, 2012). Researchers have examined the relationship between attitudes towards recycling and recycling behavior. For example, Ramayah, Lee, and Lim (2012) found that environmental awareness was significantly related to attitudes towards recycling, and attitudes and social norms had a significant impact on recycling behavior. Best and Kneip (2011) further suggested that curbside collection had a strong impact, and attitudes had a moderate effect, on intention to recycle. McCormack (2009), in addition to highlighting that attitudes towards recycling can be a strong predictor of recycling behavior, targeted the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes in this domain. Explicit attitudes are positive and negative evaluations of a target object or concept that are consciously endorsed and deliberately expressed. In contrast, implicit attitudes are triggered automatically by the mere presence of the object and are not subject to conscious control (Bohner & Dickel, 2011). The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) is often used to measure implicit attitudes. McCormack found that, after reading an argument about the necessity of recycling, participants displayed more positive implicit attitudes towards recycling in the context of an interaction expectation. McCormack suggested that measuring and understanding implicit attitudes towards recycling might provide additional insight into people’s recycling behavior without the influence of experimenter expectations or concerns about self-presentation.
IMPLICIT RECYCLING ATTITUDES 949 According to the associative–propositional evaluation (APE; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006) model, attitudes can be rooted in two types of mental processes: associative evaluation and propositional reasoning. Bohner and Dickel (2011) identified associative evaluations as the basis of implicit attitudes, and suggested that these evaluations are activated automatically when a relevant stimulus is encountered. However, in McCormack’s (2009) experiment, the written argument about recycling was presented as a kind of propositional reasoning approach. Thus, according to the APE model, his results cannot be attributed to implicit attitudes and it is necessary to examine associative evaluations that influence implicit attitudes towards recycling. McCormack pointed out that, despite little research having been conducted on the effect of associative evaluation in molding implicit environmental attitudes, shifts in implicit attitudes have been observed in other domains. For example, evaluative conditioning (EC) has been shown to change implicit attitudes towards snack foods (Lebens et al., 2011). EC can be described as “an observed change in the liking of a stimulus that results from pairing this stimulus with another, liked or disliked stimulus” (De Houwer, Baeyens, & Field, 2005, p. 162). In the EC procedure, the initial stimulus is termed the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the second stimulus is labeled the unconditioned stimulus (US). The CS is typically neutral in valence at first and becomes more positive after being paired with a positive US. We reasoned that, as with implicit attitudes towards snack foods, it might be possible to shift implicit attitudes towards recycling. Thus, we sought to examine whether or not the picture–picture EC procedure  (Lebens et al., 2011) could alter implicit recycling attitudes and behavior. The IAT was used to assess the valence of associations with recycling. We used a virtual shopping task, which is a buying task implemented in Excel, to calculate a proenvironment index for goods purchased by the participants. We proposed the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: The experimental group will have more positive implicit recycling attitudes and more negative implicit consumerism attitudes than the control group. Hypothesis 2: The experimental group will have a higher score on the pro- environment index than the control group.
Method
Participants and Procedure The Ethical Committee of Nanjing University approved this study. Participants were 26 men and 34 women (N = 60) at Nanjing University who were recruited
IMPLICIT RECYCLING ATTITUDES950 through advertisements. The participants provided written informed consent and received RMB 20 (US$3) for taking part in the study. An equal number of men and women were randomly assigned to 1 of the 2 conditions (experimental or control). Participants completed the EC task and then the IAT and, after a 10-minute break, they completed the virtual shopping task. To check if participants were aware of the CS-US contingencies in the EC task, at the end of the experiment we asked them an open-ended question about whether or not they perceived any regularities in the way the pictures were presented.
Measures Evaluative conditioning. The EC procedure was adapted from the picture– picture EC procedure (Lebens et al., 2011). A picture depicting either recycling or consumerism (CS) was presented in one of the quadrants on the computer screen for 1,000 ms. To prevent participants from becoming aware of the purpose of the experiment, they were instructed to classify the images on the basis of spatial location by pressing 1 of 2 keys: the “E” key when the recycling or consumerism picture appeared in the top two quadrants, and the “I” key when it appeared in the bottom two quadrants. Next, an image of pleasant or unpleasant scenery (US) briefly appeared in the quadrant (400 ms) in which the CS had previously appeared. This procedure was repeated for 144 trials with an intertrial interval of 1,500 ms. There were 72 trials for each CS stimulus, which was one of a selection of 12 pictures, consisting of six pictures of the recycling logo and six pictures depicting consumerism, made up of four pictures of people taking bags and two of full shopping carts. Positive US stimuli were six images of pleasant scenery, such as beautiful rivers and mountains, and negative US were six images of unpleasant scenes, such as wasting water, garbage pollution, and air pollution. In the experimental condition, consumerism pictures were paired with unpleasant scenery images, and recycling pictures were paired with pleasant scenery images. For participants in the control condition, the CS–US pairings were random so that both the recycling and consumerism stimuli were followed by positively (50%) and negatively (50%) valenced scenery images. Implicit Association Test. The IAT we used was based on the procedure and format recommended by Greenwald et al. (1998), in which participants are timed as they sort four sets of stimuli into two response categories. Our IAT target stimuli were the six pictures of the recycling logo and the six pictures of consumerism that we used during the EC procedure. The IAT attributes we used were love, joyful, happy, health, pretty, and justice, which represented six words with positive associations and hatred, disaster, evil, tragedy, ugly, and waste, as
IMPLICIT RECYCLING ATTITUDES 951 six words with negative associations. The participants’ task was to sort the words as quickly as possible into the correct response category. In the critical phases of the IAT, target stimuli and attributes are mixed; for example, “For pictures of consumerism or a positive word, press the left response key”, and “For pictures of recycling or a negative word, press the right response key”. Implicit attitudes were assessed by calculating the difference in reaction time (RT) for the two combinations of targets and attributes. According to the procedure set out by Greenwald et al. (1998) the results of the IAT depend on the assumption that RT is shorter when strongly associated concepts share the same response key; for example, “recycling picture” and “positive”, and longer when the stimuli that share a response key are either weakly associated or opposite in valence, for example, “consumerism picture” and “positive”. Virtual shopping task. For the virtual shopping task, we gave all participants an imaginary budget of RMB 400 (US$64.0) each, and asked them to buy as many goods as they needed for one month. The virtual shop was organized into request categories of snack foods, fruit, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, tissues, and stationery and select categories of clothes, books, and nutrition supplies. Participants were required to purchase items from the request categories, but could choose whether or not to buy items from the select categories. There were four items in each category that we ranked on an environmentally friendly/ healthy/quality index from 1 to 4. A higher score was associated with a higher price. We included the healthy and quality indices to prevent participants from guessing the purpose of the experiment. Participants could choose only 1 item from each of the 10 types of items that made up the request and select categories. After participants confirmed that they had selected all they needed for one month, we calculated a total sustainable consumer index as the dependent variable.
Results
All 60 participants completed the experiment and data from every participant met the statistical requirements. The results of the IAT were collected using Inquisit 3.0 software. We recorded and analyzed the relative strength of the association between target and attribute using the improved D scoring algorithm (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003). We analyzed the D scores and the amount of goods that the participants purchased using SPSS version 18.0.
Implicit Association Test In this variant of the IAT, higher D scores represented a faster performance for the recycling + positive block than for the recycling + negative block.
IMPLICIT RECYCLING ATTITUDES952 Higher scores indicated more positive associations with recycling. The analysis revealed a significant difference between the two conditions, t(58) = 2.14, p = .04, d = 0.25. Participants in the experimental condition showed more positive associations with recycling (M = 0.72, SD = 0.38) than did participants in the control condition (M = 0.46, SD = 0.32). This result supported the first part of our Hypothesis 1, that the experimental group would have more positive implicit recycling attitudes than the control group.
Virtual Shopping Task Analysis of the amount of environmentally friendly goods purchased showed no significant difference between the two conditions. Participants in the experimental (M = 16, SD = 5.42) and control (M = 17, SD = 5.86) conditions bought similar quantities, t(58) = -0.27, p = .79. In addition, the total number of goods purchased was similar in the experimental (M = 12.90, SD = 2.10) and control (M = 12.50, SD = 2.20) conditions, t(58) = -0.71, p = .48. Finally, responses to the open-ended question indicated that no participants in the experimental condition were aware of the specific CS-US contingencies.
Discussion
We examined the effect of the picture–picture EC procedure on implicit attitudes towards recycling and recycling behavior. Participants in the experimental condition preferred recycling pictures to consumerism pictures, as compared to participants in the control condition. Hence, we demonstrated that pairing images depicting consumerism with unpleasant images and images depicting recycling with pleasant images can change implicit attitudes towards recycling and consumerism. In contrast to findings in prior research (e.g., McCormack, 2009), we found that implicit attitudes towards recycling and consumerism can be altered by repeatedly showing pictures depicting consumerism and recycling paired with unpleasant and pleasant images. This finding is in line with the suggestion that experimental treatments and measures need to be matched such that automatic measures would only be malleable when the induction procedure was relatively unconscious or nonpropositional (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). Similarly, Gawronski, Strack, and Bodenhausen (2009) have argued that implicit attitudes are sensitive to associative processes that are fast and require little cognitive capacity, but are not sensitive to propositional thinking, which often requires greater cognitive capacity. The responses to the open-ended question revealed that no participant noticed when the CS and US were paired. Lebens et al. (2011) reported that Hofmann,
IMPLICIT RECYCLING ATTITUDES 953 De Houwer, Perugini, Baeyens, and Crombez (2010) found, in a meta-analysis, that EC effect sizes were almost three times higher for contingency-aware participants compared to participants who were unaware of the CS–US pairings. De Houwer (2007) pointed out that the different effects of EC can be due to different processes, for example, the automatic formation of associations in memory or propositional formation. For instance, the formation of conscious propositional knowledge about contingencies, by definition, implies awareness of the contingencies. Hence, EC effects that are due to the use of this knowledge should depend on contingency awareness, and the automatic formation of associations that occurs independently of contingency awareness reflects only the spatiotemporal contiguity between stimuli, not statistical contingency (e.g., Baeyens & De Houwer, 1995; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Our results are consistent with this line of reasoning. Although implicit attitudes towards recycling and consumerism were altered by the EC procedure, according to our results there were no behavioral effects for our participants. In the virtual shopping task participants in both conditions bought equal amounts of environmentally friendly goods. This result is inconsistent with earlier findings that implicit attitudes are predictive of, or moderate, recycling behavior (Best & Kneip, 2011; Ramayah, Lee, & Lim, 2012). This discordance may be interpreted from the viewpoint of dual-process models of information processing (Strack & Deutsch, 2004), according to which the distinction between implicit and explicit cognition lies in the underlying processing mechanisms, whereby the subconscious automatic process operates faster and with much less information than the conscious rational process. Therefore, the IAT outcome reflects automatic processes that favor recycling, whereas deciding which items to buy may be a more reflective process requiring a more extensive evaluation based on declarative knowledge (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). In line with this possibility, participants, when determining which items to buy in the virtual shopping task, needed to take numerous factors into consideration, including quality, brands, price, recycling, and health. Our results revealed that, after the EC procedure, participants’ associations with recycling were more positive, but there was no significant effect on their recycling behavior. However, the results could still help efforts to protect the environment. A common approach to promoting protection of the environment is to inform people of the urgency of the issue and the consequences of individual action, in order to encourage environmentally friendly choices (Environmental Protection Agency, 1998). We have contributed to this goal by offering a potential way to change consumers’ attitudes towards recycling. There are several limitations in this study. Firstly, the same recycling and consumerism pictures were used in both the EC and IAT tasks. This may have
IMPLICIT RECYCLING ATTITUDES954 primed the preference for recycling in the IAT task. Although no participant reported being aware of any CS–US pairings, the possibility of image priming may have affected our results. To avoid this issue, researchers could use words instead of pictures. Secondly, in order to evaluate consumers’ behavior more effectively, the virtual shopping task that we used needs to be improved. For instance, researchers could assess the effect of EC on more impulsive choices, such as whether or not to purchase a plastic bag after shopping, and could examine purchasing decisions under high cognitive load either by adding more types of goods or by imposing a time limit.

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