I study attitudes - a fundamental process in behavior regulation and decision making. Specifically, I focus
on how evaluations of individuals, social groups, and consumer products are established and changed. I examine three pathways via which people can form new, or update their existing, attitudes, judgments, and decisions:
The ‘Experience’ pathway (e.g., evaluative conditioning and approach-avoidance)
The ‘Observation’ pathway (e.g., social learning)
The ‘Verbal’ pathway (e.g., instructions and persuasion)
ATTITUDE FORMATION & CHANGE
RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS
De Houwer, J., & Hughes, S. (2020). Learning to like or dislike: Revealing similarities and differences between evaluative learning effects. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(5), 487-491. Link
Hughes, S., De Houwer, J., Mattavelli, S., & Hussey, I. (2020). The shared features principle: If two objects share a feature, people assume those objects also share other features. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(12), 2264. Link
Van Dessel, P., Hughes, S., & De Houwer, J. (in press). How Do Actions Influence Attitudes? An Inferential Account of the Impact of Action Performance on Stimulus Evaluation. Personality and Social Psychology Review. Link
Moran, T., Hughes, S.,* Hussey, I., Vadillo, M., Olson, M., et al. (2021). Incidental Attitude Formation via the Surveillance Task: A Pre-Registered Replication of Olson and Fazio (2001). Psychological Science, 32(1), 120-131.