Evaluative Consequences of Selective Attention : The Impact on Socially Meaningful Stimuli and Underlying Processes

Abstract

Recently, evidence was found that processes of selective attention modulate affective evaluations (e.g., Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003). Specifically, previously ignored stimuli were found to be affectively devaluated. That is, after a search task, previously ignored stimuli (distractors) were evaluated more negatively than attended stimuli (targets) and previously not seen stimuli (novels). The current research investigated two aspects of the effects of selective attention on evaluations. In the first part, evaluations of previously attended and ignored ingroup and outgroup members were measured to test the effect of selective attention on evaluations of socially meaningful stimuli. In two experiments, a social context was created, ingroup identification was measured (Experiment 1) and experimentally manipulated (Experiment 2), and ingroup bias was assessed from evaluations obtained for ingroup and outgroup members. Analyses showed that ingroup bias was modulated by the attentional focus, however, only for highly-identified individuals. Highly-identified individuals showed more ingroup bias after attending ingroup members and ignoring outgroup members than highly-identified individuals attending outgroup members and ignoring ingroup members. Further analyses showed that this attention-ingroup bias effect was mainly a result of an affective devaluation of previously ignored group members. These results extend previous research by showing that attentional processes affect evaluations of socially meaningful stimuli. In the second part, the underlying processes of the selective attention-evaluation link, that is, the negative effect of attentional inhibition processes on evaluations was investigated. A behavioral measurement was used to assess the effectiveness of distractor inhibition in a feature-based selection task (Experiment 3) and an object-based selection task (Experiment 4) to test the hypothesis that more effective distractor inhibition predicts more negative distractor evaluations. This hypothesis was confirmed. In both experiments, more effective distractor inhibition predicted more negative distractor evaluations. Although these results support the notion that inhibitory processes of selective attention negatively affect evaluations, no support for a general distractor devaluation effect was found in Experiment 3 and 4. Distractors were in general not evaluated more negatively than novel control stimuli. To explain these mixed results it is assumed that negative distractor devaluation effects and positive mere exposure effects partly dissolve each other. In general, the current work provides evidence that processes of selective attention affect evaluations of socially meaningful stimuli (Experiments 1 & 2) and it supports the assumption that inhibitory processes of selective attention negatively affect evaluations of previously inhibited stimuli (Experiments 3 & 4).