הרצאתה של: ד"ר טל מורן - המחלקה לחינוך ולפסיכולוגיה, האוניברסיטה הפתוחה

When people encounter other individuals, they often feel immediate reactions toward them without having control over or an intention to experience these reactions. For example, people may immediately feel fear when seeing an immigrant, even in the absence of any real danger. These quick thoughts and reactions are automatic attitudes: evaluations operating under one or more automaticity conditions (i.e., unintentionally, without control, efficiently, or with no awareness). Although scholars agree that attitudes can be activated automatically, there is a lack of consensus on the mental processes and representations that mediate their formation, expression, and modification. According to associative models, automatic evaluations are shaped by associative processes that register associative information: the mere co-occurrence of stimuli in the environment (e.g., immigrants co-occur with crimes). In contrast, propositional models posit that automatic evaluations are mediated by inference processes that, unlike associative processes, are influenced by propositional information, including the relationship between the co-occurring stimuli (e.g., immigrants cause crime versus immigrants are victims of crime) and the validity of the evaluation implied by the co-occurrence (e.g., whether I believe that immigrants are indeed dangerous). Both models contend that controlled evaluations are primarily influenced by propositional information. I will present several studies that explore the sensitivity of automatic and controlled evaluation to associative and propositional information when the evaluative implications of the two information types contradict each other. Contradicting both models, the studies demonstrate that automatic and controlled evaluations can be influenced by both associative and propositional information. I discuss the implications of these findings and suggest avenues for future research. נשמח לראותכם! ההרצאה תתקיים בשפה העברית