Mohit Sewak

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Affective and Cognitive Factors in preferences

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— Robert Zajonc and Hazel Markus —

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Food preferences changes from place to place. Humans by birth don’t like chilli pepper. But in the case of Mexicans, they like chilli pepper once they mature. If it is possible to change an innate aversion to something like chili pepper, then it should be possible to change almost any attitude and any preference.

Significant affective factors such as parental reinforcement and social conformity pressures, identification with the group, machismo and so on. This paper, “Affective and Cognitive Factors in preferences” by Robert Zajonc and Hazel Markus, stresses on affective factors. In doing this, the authors do not intend to negate cognitive influences on preferences nor minimize their importance. Cognitions that have generally been taken to be the very basis of this preference can actually occur afterward – perhaps as a justification.

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Acquiring preference through Exposures

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When objects are presented to the individual on repeated occasions, the mere exposure is capable of making the individual’s attitude toward these objects more sensitive. This is called as Exposure effect. When confronted with a familiar object, the individual was said to experience a warmth, a sense of ownership, a feeling of intimacy.

Preferences acquired in infancy and childhood are formed primarily on affective basis. By the time the child develops an extensive knowledge structure about chili peppers – i.e. before he learns to discriminate among them, identify various subtle features and discover all their uses – his preferences for them may well be completely established.

It is possible to change preferences by cognitive means alone only in early stages of preference formation, because even when a preference has been built up from cognition, its affects may become partly and fully autonomous and independent of the cognitive elements that were originally its basis. Social psychologists have tried to see what information could be given to a person so that he would become fond of some item. They asked how should this info be imparted and for best results, who should do it. Needless to say, the method of attitude change by means of persuasion has not met with a great deal of success.

It is quite reasonable to say that when a person “stores” affect, what he stores is the motor tendencies and other somatic manifestations. The behavior patterns are hard to change and hard to overcome by persuasion. The headphone experiment (where people said that they heard better when nodding than when they where shaking their head) proved that attitudes can be changed by simple things and he approached properly could be improved to a great extent. Motor basis of preferences says that change in preference can be accomplished by attention to motor correlates.

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Tags: Affective, Cognitive, Factors in preferences, The headphone experiment

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