PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN

Betsch et al. / IMPLICIT ATTITUDE FORMATION

I Like It but I Dont Know Why: A Value-Account

Approach to Implicit Attitude Formation
Tilmann Betsch
Henning Plessner
University of Heidelberg, Germany
Christiane Schwieren
University of Maastricht, the Netherlands
Robert Gtig
University of Freiburg, Germany
whether attitudes can be established by classical conditioning (Staats & Staats, 1958). With the fall of behaviorism in the middle of the last century, cognitive processes
shifted into the focus of attention in all areas of psychology. Subsequent research spotlighted mainly the explicit
part of cognition; that is, processes that can be mentally
controlled and verbalized by the subjects. Theories
emerged that described attitude change in terms of an
expectancy-value model, a notion that closely dovetails
with the subjective-expected-utility approach in decision
research (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Fishbein & Ajzen,
1974; Rosenberg, 1956; Wyer, 1973). Subsequent
approaches, such as the dual-process models (e.g.,
Chaiken, 1980; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) placed more
emphasis on shortcut strategies in attitude formation but
still focused primarily on explicit processes.
Experimental evidence, however, shows that explicit
processes are only one side of the coin. Many cognitive
operations occur automatically (Shiffrin & Schneider,
1977) and cannot be accessed by introspection (Nisbett &
Wilson, 1977). This insight directed contemporary research in social psychology back to the implicit processes
involved in judgment and behavior (Bargh, 1994; Green-

The authors suggest a theory that predicts how summary evaluations about targets are implicitly formed and stored in memory
and under which conditions they are used in attitude judgment.
First, it is assumed that the mere encoding of value-charged stimuli is a sufficient condition to initiate implicit online formation
of summary evaluations. Second, the authors claim that this
process is summative. Accordingly, the intensities of the positive
or negative responses evoked by the stimuli in the organism are
thought to be accumulated and stored in a unitary memory
structure. This hypothetical structure is called value account.
Third, it is assumed that a value account is more easily accessible in memory than are concrete traces of past experiences. Therefore, attitude judgments should rely on value accounts, especially if cognitive capacities are constrained (e.g., due to time
pressure). Three experiments that provide converging evidence
for the value-account approach are reported.

he concept of attitude was a central theme when social

psychology emerged, and it is one of the fields major topics today (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Attitudes are commonly
viewed as evaluative summaries (Fazio, 1989, p. 155) in
relation to entities (persons, objects, behaviors). Allport
(1935) took the view that attitudes are one of the most
powerful determinants of behavior and, therefore, are
an indispensable construct for understanding and predicting human judgment and decision making. This
notion dominated during the rise of social psychology
and henceforth has motivated a considerable amount of
research on attitude formation and change.
In the early days of attitude research, psychologists
were still interested in the unconscious processes underlying attitude formation. It was investigated, for instance,

Authors Note: These studies were financially supported by a grant (BE

2012/1-1) from the German Science Foundation to the first author.
Many thanks to Miguel Brendl, Klaus Fiedler, Susanne Haberstroh,
Bronwyn Jones, Jeannette Schmid, and Timothy Wilson for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tilmann Betsch,
Psychological Institute, Hauptstrasse 47-51, University of Heidelberg,
D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany; e-mail: tilmann_betsch@psi-sv2.psi.
uni-heidelberg.de.
PSPB, Vol. 27 No. 2, February 2001 242-253
2001 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

242

Betsch et al. / IMPLICIT ATTITUDE FORMATION

wald & Banaji, 1995; Uleman & Bargh, 1989). Implicit
processes have been studied in attitude research (e.g.,
Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986; Wilson,
Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000), stereotyping (e.g., Devine,
1989; Dovidio, Evans, & Tyler, 1986), self-esteem
research (e.g., Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984), and other
domains of social cognition (see Greenwald & Banaji,
1995, for an overview).
The present article joins in line with this development
in social cognition and investigates the processes of
implicit online formation of attitudes. In the remainder
of the article, we consider a situation in which the individual encounters an unfamiliar target object. The
encounter episode provides a stream of value-charged
information about the target. By value-charged, we
mean that the stimuli obtain the potential to provoke
at least to some degreepositive or negative reactions in
the individual. The chief question is whether and how
such streams of value-charged stimuli contribute to attitude formation if the individual does not intend to
explicitly evaluate the target object during the encounter episode.
We conducted three experiments to test three
hypotheses that together constitute our value-account
approach to implicit attitude formation. First, we assume
that the encoding of value-charged stimuli is a sufficient
condition to initiate implicit online formation of an attitude about the target. Second, we claim that this process
is summative. Accordingly, the intensities of the positive
or negative responses evoked by the stimuli in the organism are thought to be accumulated and stored in a unitary memory structure. We term this hypothetical memory structure value account. The value account is
thought to provide a summary evaluation that subsequently can serve as a basis to form an attitude judgment
about the target. Third, we assume that a value account is
more easily accessible in memory than are concrete
traces of past experiences. Therefore, attitude judgments should be based on value accounts, especially if
cognitive capacities are constrained (e.g., due to time
pressure).
The first and second assumptions rest on some robust
and frequently documented findings from research in
experimental psychology. There is ample evidence that
memory is capable of automatically recording fundamental aspects of experience, for example, the frequency of events (Hasher & Zacks, 1984). Consequently,
frequency estimations reveal a high degree of accuracy
(Sedlmeier, 1999), especially if a relevant coding category has been focused on during encoding (Betsch,
Siebler, Marz, Hormuth, & Dickenberger, 1999). Affective reactions in the organism are probably one of the
most important aspects of experience. Not surprisingly,
organisms are especially sensitive to the frequency of

243

value-charged experiences (Thorndike, 1898; Wolfe &

Kaplon, 1941). These and similar results underline the
assumption that the cognitive apparatus is designed to
implicitly perform accumulative operations online
(Gallistel, 1990). Moreover, recent and classical studies
in animal choice revealed that the organism also is able
to register the intensities of value-charged experiences
(Davis, Staddon, Machado, & Palmer, 1993; Hull, 1943).
Experiments 1 and 2 will test the notion that individuals
are able to implicitly accumulate intensities of values and
not only the frequency of value-charged experiences.
The idea that integration of information works in a
summative fashion contradicts the assumptions of at least
some models applied in attitude formation research. For
example, Anderson (1971, 1981) made a strong case for
averaging as a central mechanism in information integration. Therefore, Experiment 2 will contrast the summation hypothesis with alternative notions of information integration.
The third assumption to be tested in Experiment 3 is
quite straightforward if one considers what we know
about the conditions under which the quality and quantity of memories influence subsequent judgment. In general, one could expect that once an attitude has been
formed online, people often simply retrieve this attitude
rather than forming a new one each time when they have
to reevaluate an object (Hastie & Park, 1986). Furthermore, it does not necessitate effortful inferences to retrieve an established evaluation from memory (Zajonc,
1980). The activation of the attitude object often suffices
to activate a stored evaluation as well (Fazio, 1989; Fazio &
Towles-Schwen, 1999). However, people do not always
rely on stored evaluations. For example, if they are motivated to be accurate in their judgments, they might
deliberate on concrete arguments and finally arrive at a
new attitude. Such a deliberative process of attitude formation obviously requires time for information search,
evaluation, and integration. In turn, under time pressure, one would expect that individuals are not likely to
form an attitude in a deliberative fashion but rather to
rely on an already established evaluation (Fazio, 1989).
Results from research on frequency judgment converge
with such a notion. In our own studies, we could demonstrate that individuals are most likely to rely on online,
formed frequency records under time constraints
(Haberstroh, Betsch, & Aarts, 2000).
EXPERIMENT 1

The first experiment tests the hypotheses (a) that encoding of value-charged stimuli is a sufficient condition
to initiate implicit online formation of an attitude about
the target object and (b) that this process is summative.

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Method
STIMULUS MATERIAL

A strict test of the hypotheses requires a research paradigm that allows (a) a precise quantification of values
conveyed by the stimuli and (b) a maximum of control
over the learning process to avoid that participants
explicitly form an attitude when receiving value-charged
information about the target.
An effective manipulation of the distribution of values basically requires that numeric values be assigned to
each outcome on a particular outcome dimension.
Moreover, subjective evaluation of the outcomes should
be likely to form a monotonically increasing function
over the a priori value scale used in the experiment. This
simply means that increasing objective scale values
should lead to an increase in the participants subjective
values (more-is-better principle). Violations of
monotonicity are likely to occur if multiple goals are
involved (e.g., Keeney, 1981). With respect to the
requirement of quantifiability and to reduce the likelihood that multiple goals interfere, we decided to use
shares as attitude objects in our experiments, which are
mainly associated with one outcome dimension, namely,
profit. On the operational level, the a priori value of an
outcome is quantified as a particular increase of the
shares price (return) on a stock exchange. Obviously,
another advantage of choosing this judgment domain is
that return distributions can be easily varied to achieve
differences in the sum of values.
The stimulus material consisted of five shares that differed with respect to their sum of return values. Participants were sequentially presented with return information of the shares in random order. In addition, they
were informed that a return value (in deutschmarks
[DM]) does not represent the absolute price of the share
but rather an increase in value compared to the previous
trading date. Frequency of appearance and peak and
bottom values were kept identical for all shares. Specifically, 15 returns were reported for each share. The
bottom and the peak values were 10 and 55 DM, respectively. The end values of the return distributions were
similar and varied between 30 and 35 DM for all shares.
However, the shares differed markedly with regard to
their sums of returns (300, 400, 500, 600, 700 DM).
To maximize the effectiveness of the learning procedure, we first tried to reduce the influence of prior knowledge. In the experimental presentation, the shares were
labeled with names that, according to pretests, did not
systematically differ in familiarity and affective quality
(i.e., RONAT, ELSKAR, FAMO, NARWIG, PATEL). Second, we asked participants to read the stimulus information aloud to ensure that all of the return values were
encoded. The return values appeared in random order

on a running caption on a computer screen. Third, to

reduce the likelihood that participants explicitly form
online judgments during the presentation, we obscured
the true objective of the study and directed the participants attention toward distracting aspects of the task.
For this purpose, we additionally presented ads on the
computer screen that were electronically scanned from
common public journals. The ads changed consecutively every 5 secs. Participants were asked to focus their
attention primarily on the ads.
PARTICIPANTS AND DESIGN

Twenty students (9 men, 11 women; M age = 24.3

years) of different majors at the University of Heidelberg
volunteered for an experiment titled consumer
research in return for two paperback books. We varied
the sum of return values (in DEM) of the shares as a
within-subjects factor on five levels (RONAT: 300,
ELSKAR: 400, FAMO: 500, NARWIG: 600, PATEL: 700).
PROCEDURE

The complete experiment was controlled by a computer program written in Visual Basic. Participants were
seated in front of a personal computer (PC) screen. They
were told that the objective of the study was to investigate
their capability of memorizing pictorial ads while being
distracted by information about shares. They were instructed to primarily concentrate on the ads because
they would have to answer memory questions concerning ads later. In addition, they were requested to simultaneously read the share information appearing on the
running caption aloud. Before the presentation was
started, participants had to address some questions
about their attitudes toward ads to let them practice the
use of the interactive devices of the computer dialogue
that were later used to measure the dependent variables
(i.e., a multiple-choice table, a scroll bar, and a
numberpad). After this introductory task, the stimulus
material was presented. The presentation contained 75
pieces of return information (15 per share) and 60 different ads; it lasted about 10 minutes. Subsequently, participants had to answer 30 multiple-choice questions
concerning the ads. The reason for this part of the procedure was (a) to keep in line with the cover story and (b)
to extinguish concrete memories about single returns
that could have been available directly after the presentation of the return information.
Then the dependent measures were assessed. Specifically, participants were requested to evaluate each of
the five shares and to estimate sum and average of each
of the five return distributions. Attitudes toward the
shares were assessed by means of a vertical scroll bar with
the endpoints labeled very good at the top and very bad at
the bottom. The scroll bar appeared for each share on a
separate screen and people were asked to give spontane-

Betsch et al. / IMPLICIT ATTITUDE FORMATION

TABLE 1:

245

Attitude Judgment, Estimation of Sum of Returns, and Estimation of Average of Returns by Sum of Returns in Experiment 1
Sum of Returns (in deutschmarks)
300
M

Attitude judgment
Estimation of sum
Estimation of average

0.05
121.90
22.50

400
SD

2.83
122.2
16.7

500

600

SD

SD

0.44
141.30
24.30

1.46
150.9
17.2

0.77
134.40
20.10

1.93
120.6
16.1

ous answers to the question, How do you find this share?

(in German, Wie finden Sie diese Aktie?). Afterward, participants were asked to estimate the sum and average of
returns for each share by means of a numberpad presented simultaneously on the screen. Finally, participants were probed for suspicion in a postexperimental
interview and were fully debriefed.
Results
The postexperimental interviews revealed that none
of the participants was suspicious about the ostensible
purpose of the experiment. Thus, all of the 20 cases were
entered into subsequent analyses. We obtained no
effects for gender and age.
ATTITUDE JUDGMENTS

Attitude judgments ranged from 5 (very bad) to +5

(very good). Table 1 includes mean attitude judgments
for each of the five shares. The judgments were subjected to a simple ANOVA with the five shares as a repeated measurement factor. The ANOVA revealed a
highly significant effect, F(4, 76) = 5.25, p < .01, showing
that participants could clearly differentiate between the
five shares in their attitude judgments. Moreover, attitude judgments perfectly corresponded to the sum of
returns of the shares (cf. Table 1). For example, PATEL,
with the largest sum of 700 DEM, received the most positive response (M = 2.20) and RONAT, with the lowest
sum of 300 DEM, was judged the least positive (M = 0.05).
ESTIMATION OF SUM AND AVERAGE

Participants were asked to estimate the sum of returns

and the average return for each of the shares. The mean
estimation ratings also are included in Table 1. Both kinds
of estimations were analyzed using a simple ANOVA with
shares as a within-subject factor. No significant effect was
obtained (both Fs < 1.5), which means that participants
were not able to differentiate between the shares regarding sums and averages of returns. The mean estimation
ratings did not correspond at all to the real differences of
the shares sum of returns (cf. Table 1). Pairwise Pearson
correlation coefficients were calculated for the estimation of sum of returns and the estimation of the average
return with the attitude judgment for each of the five

700

SD

1.25
164.70
26.40

2.30
181.5
18.7

SD

2.20
115.00
25.60

1.69
129.1
19.9

shares. No coefficient involving the attitude judgment

differed significantly from a zero correlation (all ps > .25).
Discussion
Attitude judgments reflected a remarkable degree of
sensitivity to the sum of values of previously encoded
information, although participants did not intend to
form an attitude judgment online. The results corroborate the hypothesis that encoding of value-charged stimuli is a sufficient condition to prompt a process by which
values are implicitly summed up online and stored in
memory. Note that the frequencies of positive stimuli
(returns of money) were identical for all objects (shares).
Therefore, the effect cannot be due to a mere accumulation of return frequencies. Moreover, the perfect rank
order correlation between the actual sum of returns and
the attitude judgments support the assumption that the
implicitly established value accounts in memory can
reflect the whole history of previous experiences.
The possibility that the results stem from an explicit
calculation of sums during encoding is not tenable:
Share returns were presented as distractor information
in a task in which participants had to focus on attentiongrabbing, pictorial ads and were expecting to answer
questions concerning these ads later. Furthermore, participants had to sequentially encode 75 pieces of return
information that were not blocked per share but rather
occurred in random order. These circumstances made it
very difficult to sum up return values explicitly during
encoding. In fact, all participants in the postexperimental interviews confirmed our own impression that it is
simply impossible to calculate any statistics during
encoding in this paradigm. The results of the memory
measures empirically substantiated this notion. They
showed that participants were not able to reliably estimate sums or averages of the five return distributions.
EXPERIMENT 2

The results of the previous study still allow for an alternative interpretation of the underlying mechanism of
implicit information integration. Due to the constraints
set up by the manipulation to keep frequency of returns
and peak and bottom values constant over shares, an
increase of the sum of outcomes entailed an increase in

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the average. Hence, we cannot rule out the possibility

that people might have been implicitly sensitive to the
average of the return distributions rather than being
sensitive to their sum.
Information integration theory (e.g., Anderson,
1981), which is among the most influential integration
accounts in attitude research, assumes that attitudes
reflect the weighted average of the input scale values. A
series of recent articles (Fredrickson & Kahnemann, 1993;
Kahnemann, Fredrickson, Schreiber, & Redelmeier,
1993; Redelmeier & Kahnemann, 1996) demonstrated
that retrospective evaluations of affective episodes are
predicted fairly well by a special version of the averaging
model, the so-called peak-and-end rule. Accordingly,
people are assumed to base their evaluative judgments of
past episodes on a limited number of outstanding events,
such as the peak and end experiences. The peak-andend heuristic can be considered a special version of the
averaging rule in which the peak and end experiences
are positively and equally weighted and the other experiences are assigned zero weights.
With the second experiment, we tried to replicate the
previous findings and to out-rule the alternative interpretation by avoiding a confounding of sum and average
in the return distributions. Moreover, we considered mere
exposure, frequency of positive outcomes, and peak of
outcome values to assess the relative impact of sum and
average of values on implicit attitude formation.
Method
STIMULUS MATERIAL

The experimental paradigm was virtually the same as

in the previous study. We only replaced the pictorial ads
by videotaped TV ads to render the distractor material
more attention grabbing. The pay-off matrix of the shares,
however, was substantially changed. We varied the features of the return distributions in such a way that a certain target share dominates the others with respect to a
single relevant feature. For instance, one share had the
largest sum but was dominated by the others if one considers another feature, such as exposure frequency or
average. For convenience, we henceforth label a share
after that feature by which it dominates the others
(SUM, FREQUENCY, AVERAGE, PEAK, EXPOSE).
Using this method, the relevant factors compete against
each other at the same time. Their influence can be easily assessed by comparing the attitude judgments to the
shares within subjects. For instance, if the sum of values is
the dominant factor in implicit attitude formation, SUM
should receive the most positive attitude judgment.
To construct such distributions, we had to include
neutral outcome information, for instance, to manipulate mere exposure frequency without associating a particular return value with the shares name. Accordingly,

and in deviation from the previous experiment, either a

positive return value or a note, indicating that return
information is not available (neutral information)
appeared together with the shares name. The participants were told in a cover story that the partial lack of
return information was due to incomplete archive data.
The left side of Table 2 shows the structure of the
return distributions of six target shares used in Experiment 2: SUM had the largest sum of returns in comparison to all other shares; FREQUENCY had a lower sum of
returns but produced the highest number of returns; the
largest single returns were reported for PEAK and
AVERAGEAVERAGE differed from PEAK with respect
to a lower frequency of returns and, therefore, a higher
average of returns; EXPOSE appeared most frequently
but always in association with neutral information; and
EXPOSE* was presented as often as EXPOSE but as many
returns as for SUM and PEAK were reported. For all
shares, we ensured that return values did not differ significantly at the beginning and the end of the presentation.
PARTICIPANTS AND DESIGN

Eighty-four students (59 women, 25 men; M age = 23.1

years) of different majors at the University of Heidelberg
volunteered for an experiment called advertising
research and were paid 15 DEM for their participation.
Exposure to the different return distributions was again
the crucial factor and was varied on six levels within subjects. Accordingly, each participant was presented with
the return distributions of the six target shares as
described in the Material section.
Moreover, we introduced two between-subjects factorsFocus of Attention and Mode of Attitude Measurementto test for the robustness of the effects obtained
in Experiment 1. Participants were either instructed to
concentrate primarily on the share information or primarily on the ads. Mode of Attitude Measurement also
was varied on two levels (comparative vs. absolute). In
the comparative mode condition, all shares appeared
together on the screen when attitude judgments were
assessed. The participants entries on the rating scales
remained visible until all shares were rated. In the absolute mode condition, shares appeared consecutively on
the screen. They were rated one after another and inspection of previous ratings was not possible. Altogether, this
resulted in a 6 2 2 (Share Focus of Attention Mode
of Measurement) design with repeated measurement on
the first factor. The participants were randomly assigned
to one of the four between-subjects conditions. The
experiment was conducted in small groups consisting of
4 participants at most.
PROCEDURE

Participants were seated in front of a PC monitor. The

working stations were separated from each other by fold-

Betsch et al. / IMPLICIT ATTITUDE FORMATION

TABLE 2:

247

Information Structure and Memory Judgments in Experiment 2

Judged Distribution

Return Distribution
Share
SUM
FREQUENCY
PEAK
AVERAGE
EXPOSE
EXPOSE*

Frequency
of Exposure

Frequency
of Returns

Average
Return

Peak
Return

Sum of
Returns

20
20
20
20
25
25

15
20
15
10
0
15

40
25
33
50

33

60
60
75
75

60

600
500
500
500

500

Frequency of Returns

Average Return

Peak Return

SD

SD

SD

17.2
14.7
13.9
12.8
15.1
14.1

19.9
17.3
15.3
15.0
19.5
16.6

21.4
22.5
20.3
19.3
17.5
18.8

11.4
14.9
14.8
14.8
10.5
13.8

35.3
31.4
30.5
29.8
37.1
26.8

18.8
19.9
14.7
19.6
21.2
16.3

NOTE: Shares were labeled after that feature by which it dominates the others (e.g., SUM, FREQUENCY, PEAK, AVERAGE, EXPOSE, EXPOSE*).

ing screens. An initial instruction appeared on the monitor and also was read aloud by a female experimenter. In
the instructions, it was stated that the experiment was
concerned with the human capacity to simultaneously
process multiple sources of information. Specifically, it
would be investigated how efficient TV ads are if at the
same time another kind information is shown. At this
point, two different versions of the instructions were
used to manipulate the focus of attention. In one condition, the focus of attention was placed on the ads. Participants were instructed to concentrate on the ads and were
told that they were to answer some questions about the
ads later. In addition, they were requested to read the
information appearing in the running captions aloud.
This request was announced as a secondary task to constrain participants information-processing capacities.
In the other condition, attention was directed toward
the share information. Participants were instructed to
concentrate on the return values because they were to
answer questions about the shares later. They also were
asked to read the information about the shares aloud.
After this instruction, some general questions about
the attitudes toward TV ads appeared on the screen to let
participants practice the use of three kinds of interactive
devices that were later used to measure the dependent
variables (i.e., a multiple-choice table, a numberpad,
and a scroll bar for attitude measurement). When the
participants had finished this task, they were asked to
turn their seats around and to watch the commercials
and the running caption on a 70-cm TV screen. To
ensure that the participants did not distract each other
by reading aloud, they were equipped with sound deadening headphones through which only the original
sound of the commercials was audible. The videotaped
ads lasted about 15 mins. After watching the video, the
participants returned to their working stations and were
asked to evaluate each of the six shares and two control
shares about which no information was given before.
They had to intuitively judge each share on a vertical
scroll bar with the endpoints labeled good at the top and
bad at the bottom. They were forced to respond within 8

secs. After 6 secs, a visual warning signal appeared at the

top of the screen.
As a second between-subjects factor, we varied the
mode of attitude measurement. The scroll bars for each
share appeared exclusively on the screen in the absolutemode condition, and all scrollbars were visible simultaneously in the comparative-mode condition. In both
conditions, participants were to evaluate the shares in
the same fixed order and the time limits for judgments
were held constant for each share. In the compare condition, the scroll bars of the eight shares were activated
consecutively from the left to the right. After a judgment
had been made, the final position of the bar was kept on
the screen so that participants could always inspect their
previous ratings. After having judged the last share, participants had the opportunity to readjust their judgments for all shares. In this phase, they could work at
their own pace. Actually, only a minority made use of this
possibility and no significant differences in their evaluations resulted from this change.
After attitude assessment, participants had to estimate
frequency of returns, average, peak, and sum of returns
for each share by means of a mouse-controlled numberpad. Finally, the participants had to answer 20 multiplechoice questions referring to the content of the ads (e.g.,
the brand names of perfumes that appeared in the
video). Furthermore, they had to rate how familiar they
were with share investing. At the end of the session, participants were probed for suspicion, debriefed, and paid.
Results
Postexperimental interviews revealed that none of
the participants was suspicious about the cover stories
and the procedure. A few participants reported an interest in the share issue in general or the fact that they were
familiar with share investing on the stock market. Exclusion of these cases from data did not alter any of the results.
Consequently, we included all 84 cases in the analyses
reported below. Again, we did not obtain any effects for
gender and age.

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TABLE 3:

Attitude Judgments in Experiment 2

Focus of Attention on Shares
Absolute

SUM
FREQUENCY
PEAK
AVERAGE
EXPOSE
EXPOSE*

Focus of Attention on Ads

Compare

Absolute

Compare

SD

SD

SD

1.56
0.82
0.37
0.88
0.32
1.20

1.56
1.89
1.58
1.33
1.74
1.65

1.58
1.84
0.56
0.38
0.97
0.10

2.24
1.44
1.91
2.27
1.86
2.13

1.39
1.16
0.27
0.10
0.14
0.72

1.85
2.26
1.61
2.51
2.15
2.37

M
1.45
0.65
0.73
0.32
0.42
0.54

SD
1.59
1.81
1.49
2.51
1.91
2.33

NOTE: Shares are labeled after that feature by which it dominates the others (e.g., SUM, FREQUENCY, PEAK, AVERAGE, EXPOSE, EXPOSE*).

CHECK FOR THE ATTENTION MANIPULATION

Half of the participants was instructed to primarily

focus on the ads, whereas the other half was to focus on
the outcome information of the shares. The knowledge
questions about the ads, administered after the attitude
judgment, provided a measure for the attention manipulation. Participants who were instructed to attend to the
ads answered 51.5% (chance = 33.3%) of the questions
correctly. In the other condition, only 41.1% of questions were answered correctly. This difference is significant according to a Mann-Whitney-U test, U(84) = 2317.0,
p < .01. This shows that the attention manipulation was
effective. The absolute difference between the proportions of correctly answered questions may appear to be
somewhat small. Pretests, however, revealed that even
those participants who watched the ads in the absence of
a dual-task manipulation were not able to address more
than 60% of questions correctly. With respect to this
empirically obtained ceiling value, the difference
between the two experimental conditions is quite substantial because it covers almost 20% of the range of the
shortened measurement scale.
ATTITUDE JUDGMENTS

The attitudinal responses on the scroll bar were measured on a scale from 5 (bad) to +5 (good). The empirical neutral point of the scale was slightly below the scale
midpoint as evident from the average evaluations of the
control shares (M = 0.73, SD = 1.45). Mean attitude
judgments for the six target shares appear in Table 3.
The data were subjected to a 2 2 6 (Attention Measure Share) ANOVA with the last being a repeated measurement factor. As in the previous experiment, we again
obtained a highly significant effect for the share factor,
F(5, 400) = 10.05, p < .01. Neither the attention manipulation nor the variation of the mode of measurement
(absolute vs. comparative) produced a significant effect
(all Fs < 1.7). For further analyses, the data were collapsed over these two factors. t tests revealed differences

between three groups of shares. SUM (M = 1.50) and

FREQUENCY (M = 1.12) yielded significantly higher
scores than all other shares, ts(83) > 3, ps < .01. PEAK (M =
0.48), AVERAGE (M = 0.37), and EXPOSE* (M = 0.64)
were liked better than EXPOSE (M = 0.30), ts(83) > 2,
ps < .05. No other significant differences were found. As
in Experiment 1, SUM was rated best. However, the difference in subjective valence between SUM and FREQUENCY (which had the highest frequency of returns)
did not reach an acceptable level of significance.
MEMORY JUDGMENTS

Participants estimated the average, the frequency, and

the peak of returns for each share. For each estimate, we
performed a 2 2 6 ANOVA with attention and attitude
measure as between-subjects factors and share as a
within-subjects factor. The only effect obtained was a
main effect for the share factor on the peak estimates,
F(5, 400) = 3.09, p < .01. However, a look at the average
peak returns as estimated by the participants revealed
that this effect did not stem from accurate memory (see
right side of Table 2).
Discussion
The present results replicate the findings of Experiment 1 and also strongly corroborate our central hypothesis, which states that accumulative operations are dominant in implicit attitude formation. Moreover, the
findings obtained clearly rule out the alternative interpretation of the results from the first study that judgments might have reflected the average rather than the
sum of outcome values. Both the share with the highest
return average and the one with the highest peak of
returns were judged significantly less favorable than the
sum winner. These findings were robust against the
mode of measurement (absolute vs. comparative) and
the focus manipulation of attention. The lack of effect
for the focus manipulation in the dual task requires
some further consideration. One should have expected
that placing the focus on the shares should improve

Betsch et al. / IMPLICIT ATTITUDE FORMATION

memory for outcome exemplars and the characteristics
of the outcome distribution. This, however, was clearly
not the case, as evident from the null effect of the attention factor on the memory measures. In fact, reading the
values from the running caption in addition to watching
the ads left almost no capacity for elaborating on the outcome information. In postexperimental interviews, the
majority of our participants stated that it was neither possible for them to deliberately evaluate the shares while
reading the values nor was it possible for them to remember any particular aspect of the distributions. Most of
them had no confidence in their own judgments and
were not willing to believe that in fact their judgments
were highly systematic. These observations are corroborated by the memory measures and, as reported below,
by the difficulty in inducing a reliable exemplar memory
in the participants of Experiment 3.
EXPERIMENT 3

As already mentioned in the introduction, we assume

that implicitly formed value accounts are very easily
accessible in memory and thus provide a basic source for
evaluative judgments. Presumably, such accounts of
implicitly formed attitudes may be automatically evoked
whenever the attitude object is encountered. Therefore,
attitude judgments should be based on value accounts,
especially if cognitive capacities are constrained (e.g.,
due to time pressure). To test this idea, we had to provide
participants with an alternative basis for judgment; for
example, with memories of concrete return values. Due
to the information overload in our paradigm, this is
quite difficult to achieve. After a series of pretests, we
decided to employ a very strong manipulation to
enhance the memory for concrete events. Specifically,
we directly asked participants to remember certain
return values highlighted in red on the running caption.
This procedure is actually highly demanding in that it
provokes the individual to use only this information in
subsequent judgment. However, retrieval of explicit
knowledge (e.g., return exemplars) from memory takes
time (e.g., Schimmack, 1997; Verplanken, Hofstee, &
Janssen, 1998), whereas feelings of positivity and
negativity, respectively, are assumed to be readily available (e.g., Wundt, 1907; Zajonc, 1968, 1980). Accordingly, we varied time pressure during judgment as an
independent variable to trigger the use of either base of
knowledge. In the absence of time pressure, we expected
attitude judgments to reflect the values of the returns,
which were made salient during encoding. Under time
pressure, however, individuals should not be able to
retrieve these exemplars from memory and, therefore,
should rely on their value accounts.

249

Method
PARTICIPANTS AND DESIGN

The sample consisted of 62 undergraduate students

of different subject matters of the University of Heidelberg (32 women and 30 men; M age = 23.2 years). They
participated in an experiment titled TV-commercials
and received 15 DEM for their participation. They
received information about the returns of two focal
shares (together with four distractor shares). For the first
focal share, a return with a high value was highlighted.
An especially low return value was highlighted for second focal share. Half of the participants had to make
subsequent attitude judgments within a time limit of 6
secs, whereas the other half made judgments without
time constraints. Time pressure and salient return (high
vs. low) yielded a 2 2 factorial design, with the last one
being a within-subjects factor. Participants were randomly assigned to the experimental groups.
MATERIAL

Participants watched the same set of TV ads as in the

previous study. Again, outcome information appeared
simultaneously on a running caption at the bottom of
the screen. Sum of returns of the two focal shares
amounted to 700 and 600, respectively. At the end of the
running caption, single returns of both shares were
made salient by changing the color from yellow to red.
Most important, the salient returns were 10 for the SUM
winner and 50 for the SUM loser. Counterconfounding
sum and salient peak of returns allows us to determine
which kind of information (value account vs. exemplar
memory) people may have relied on in making their
judgments. If judgments are based on value accounts,
people should judge the SUM winner (sum 700/salient
return 10) more positively than the SUM loser (600/50).
This pattern should reverse if judgments are based on
explicit exemplar memory.
PROCEDURE

The procedure was virtually the same as in the condition of Experiment 2, in which the focus of attention was
directed toward the ads. However, there were three important changes. First, participants were told to memorize the values of those returns that appeared in red
color on the running caption. This part of the instruction was repeated after a practice task. Second, in the timeconstrained condition, subjects were forced to make
their attitude judgments within 6 secs. In the other condition, no time limits were used but judgments could not
be made before 6 secs (the cursor was blocked on the
scroll bar for 6 secs). The third deviation from Experiment 2 was that we employed some new measures of explicit knowledge about the shares returns. In a set of
multiple-choice tasks, participants had to check which of

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PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN

the presented shares had the largest sum, the highest

average, and the highest frequency of returns. In addition, they were asked to remember the single returns of
the two shares that appeared in red color. They could
check one out of four response categories: 10, 30, 50,
and I dont know.
Results
A requirement for the supposed influence of the single salient returns on the judgments being made after 6
secs was that participants had to be able to accurately
remember these returns. This was checked by the recognition task, in which they were to recognize the salient
return for both shares. Only 12 of the 62 participants had
chosen the correct returns for both shares and 24 gave
no correct answer at all. The data are reported only for
those participants who had chosen at least one correct
alternative (n = 17 within 6 sec and n = 21 after 6 sec).
ATTITUDE JUDGMENTS

Table 4 includes mean attitude judgments for the two

focal shares in the two experimental groups. These data
were subjected to a 2 2 ANOVA with time pressure
(within vs. after 6 secs) as a between-subjects factor and
share (700/10 vs. 600/50) as a within-subjects factor. A
2 2 ANOVA revealed a main effect for share that was
close to statistical significance, F(1, 36) = 3.78, p < .06,
and a significant interaction between time pressure and
share, F(1, 36) = 4.11, p < .05. According to our hypotheses, attitude judgments corresponded to the differences
in the sum of returns if the participants were time constrained (i.e., the SUM winner was liked better than the
SUM loser). This pattern reversed in the absence of time
constraints. Judgments corresponded to the differences
in the shares return exemplars (i.e., the SUM loser that
holds a higher exemplar return was rated higher than
the SUM winner).
MEMORY JUDGMENTS

Despite the above-mentioned performance on the

recognition measure of return exemplars, participants
again lacked any valid explicit memory for the characteristics of the distributions. According to 2 analysis, no differences occurred in the frequency of choice for all presented shares (targets and foils) with respect to the
features of sum of returns, 2(5, N = 38) = 6.62, p > .05,
and average return, 2(5, N = 38) = 8.56, p > .05. An effect
was found for the frequency of returns, 2(5, N = 38) =
14.10, p < .05, albeit the actual frequency of returns was
the same for each share.
Discussion
The results corroborate the hypothesis in all relevant
aspects. In the absence of time pressure, attitude judgments reflected the values of the return exemplars, which

TABLE 4:

Attitude Judgments for the Focal Shares in Experiment 3

Judgment Time
Within 6 Seconds

700/10
600/50

After 6 Seconds

SD

SD

1.67
1.23

1.97
2.43

0.05
2.10

2.22
2.67

Sum/Salient Return

were made salient during encoding. Under time constraints, in contrast, attitudes tended to reflect the sums
of return distributions. This pattern of results suggests
that people are prone to rely on their online-formed
value accounts if the cognitive resources are constrained.
However, when the attitude judgment was delayed, so
that people had enough time for deliberation, their attitudes were memory based, reflecting concrete outstanding exemplars of previous experiences. The results of
this study converge with the findings obtained by Wilson,
Hodges, and LaFleur (1995). Their participants, when
asked to analyze reasons of their impressions of a target
person, also were likely to construct a memory-based attitude. To conclude, the third experiment substantiates
the postulate that implicitly formed attitudes of outcome
values are very easily accessible in memory and, therefore,
can determine attitude judgments under time constraints
even if relevant exemplar memory has been established.
The results again provide evidence for the value-account
approach, which assumes summative operations to be
dominant in implicit attitude formation.
GENERAL DISCUSSION

We conducted three experiments to substantiate the

value-account approach to implicit attitude formation.
The results of all studies support the assumption that
encoding of value-charged stimuli is a sufficient condition to initiate implicit online formation and storage of
an attitude about the target object. We termed the hypothetical memory structure value account to mirror the
notion that the underlying process of information integration is accumulative. Indeed, the results converge in
corroborating the assumption that the cognitive apparatus is capable of implicitly performing two kinds of operations that adhere to the basic arithmetic principles of
counting and adding. Moreover, we made predictions
about the conditions under which attitude judgments
are likely to be based on value accounts. The third experiment provides evidence for the prediction that attitude
judgments are based on value accounts especially if cognitive capacities are constrained by time pressure.
AVERAGING VERSUS SUMMATION

As predicted, attitude judgments were not sensitive to

the average of outcome values (cf. Experiment 2). This

Betsch et al. / IMPLICIT ATTITUDE FORMATION

finding deserves some discussion because information
integration in attitude formation often is thought to be
best described by an averaging model and its variants
(e.g., Anderson, 1981; Fredrickson & Kahnemann, 1993;
Massaro & Friedmann, 1990). There is at least one possible explanation for the null effect in our studies. Performing averaging operations basically requires memory
records both for the (weighted) sum of outcome values
and for sample size. Furthermore, these two parameters
have to be integrated at the end of the presentation. In
this respect, averaging in a serial presentation requires a
great deal of computational effort mainly at the end of the
sequence when average values have to be calculated for
all objects at once (e.g., for 5 shares as in Experiment 1).
In a parallel presentation format, however, averaging
operations are presumably easier to perform because
the order in which the information is processed can be
determined individually so that average values can be
computed for one object after another. In fact, many
studies providing evidence for averaging have presented
all pieces of information together at the same time (e.g.,
Anderson, 1981). Consequently, participants can easily
screen the whole value matrix and evaluate one object
after another. A variant of the averaging model is the
peak-and-end rule as put forward by Kahnemann and
colleagues (e.g., Kahnemann et al., 1993). In our experiments, outstanding exemplars in the distribution of
returns had no reliable impact on implicit attitude formation. Results of Experiment 2 clearly show that the
shares having the highest sum of returns were rated
more favorably than the share with the highest peak
return. Given that end values in the distributions were
held constant in our experiments, these findings challenge the notion that retrospective evaluations follow a
peak-and-end rule.
On the other hand, our results are in line with a number
of models that also assume that integration of evaluative
information is summative. Common to these approaches
is the idea that value-charged events are accounted and
that these accounts are continuously updated over time.
Furthermore, these accounts are assumed to be easily
accessible and to have a strong impact on judgment and
choice. Such models have been put forward in the political sciences (Lodge, Steenbergen, & Brau, 1995), clinical psychology (Gottman, 1994), animal learning
research (e.g., Davis et al., 1993; Hull, 1943), and decision making (Betsch, 1995).
Both approaches, averaging and summation, have
received empirical support. One could assume that
summative operations might be dominant in implicit
information aggregation and under information overload. Averaging rules might be employed when the individual has enough time and cognitive resources available
to explicitly evaluate a limited number of pieces of infor-

251

mation. Although this idea is compatible with the findings in Experiment 3, it is yet mere speculation and
deserves further research.
WERE ATTITUDES IMPLICITLY FORMED ONLINE?

Our experimental paradigm ensured that explicit

attitude formation was unlikely to occur. Except in one
condition of Experiment 2, participants did not intend
to form attitudes during encoding of return information
because they expected to be questioned about the ads
later. The encoding of returns was framed to serve as a
secondary, distractor task. Furthermore, participants
had to process between 75 and 150 pieces of return information that were rapidly presented on a running caption. In fact, keeping pace with the presentation itself
absorbs a great deal of cognitive resources so that it is
almost impossible for participants to explicitly make
online judgments during encoding. Memory tests corroborated this notion. Indeed, participants were not
able to reliably retrieve any concrete information about
the shares. This was true even for the condition in Experiment 2, in which participants were instructed to focus
their attention on the shares. Furthermore, participants
spontaneously reported in postexperimental interviews
to have lacked any concrete knowledge about the shares
presented. Often they discredited their own judgments
with the argument that these would be based on feelings
rather than knowledge. Taken together, we are confident that it was impossible for our participants to calculate the sum of returns explicitly during encoding.
LIMITATIONS AND DIRECTIONS OF FURTHER RESEARCH

Finally, some remarks are in order to point out the

limitations of our findings. First, we speculated that averaging may be likely to occur in explicit attitude formation, whereas summative processes are at work in
implicit information integration. In a couple of recent
studies, we have already received some preliminary support for this notion (Betsch, Plessner, Gtig, &
Schwieren, 1999) but additional work is needed to determine the context conditions that instigate averaging
processes in attitude formation. Second, we have yet only
touched the surface of the phenomenon of implicit attitude formation. In another line of research, we go
deeper into this issue and investigate to what degree people are able to voluntarily control the influence of
implicitly formed value accounts on their attitude judgments (Plessner, Haberstroh, & Betsch, 2000). Third, we
have considered only one attribute domain in the above
studies. Hence, one could ague that the findings might
be domain specific and should not be rashly generalized.
Nonetheless, since conducting the present research, we
have obtained preliminary evidence that the results replicate the domain of political attitudes (Plessner, Betsch,
Schwieren, & Schallies, 2000). Fourth, we exclusively var-

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ied gains in the return distributions. Future investigations must be undertaken as to whether losses are implicitly processed in a similar way. Fifth, we did not vary trend
or pattern characteristics in the outcome distributions.
Due to the fact that recent contributions to this issue
mostly consider explicit processes of judgment and decision making (e.g., Ariely, 1998; Schmitt & Kemper, 1996),
it surely would be worthwhile to study trend and pattern
effects in implicit attitude formation.
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Received September 13, 1999
Revision accepted December 22, 1999