GENERALIZATION AND DISPLACEMENT IN LAC 1 Lateral Attitude Change: Does Acceptance Versus Rejection of Focal Change Cause Generalization Versus Displacement?

The lateral attitude change (LAC) model distinguishes between generalization effects, where explicit and implicit attitude change toward a focal object generalize to similar, lateral objects, and displacement effects, where there is no explicit attitude change on the focal object, but only on lateral objects. To test the notion that conscious acceptance versus rejection of focal change distinguishes between the two patterns, female participants (N = 201) underwent positive versus negative evaluative conditioning (EC) of two focal objects and were then either not asked or asked to ignore the stimulus pairings they had seen in EC (rejection manipulation). Later, explicit and implicit attitudes toward the focal objects as well as toward several lateral objects were assessed via selfreports and an affect misattribution procedure, respectively. Unexpectedly, results showed that explicit focal attitudes were affected by EC independently of the rejection manipulation; also unexpectedly, EC effects on implicit focal attitudes depended on the rejection manipulation, with an EC effect evident only in the no-rejection conditions. Explicit lateral attitudes also were affected by EC independently of the rejection manipulation, whereas implicit lateral attitudes only showed a trend toward an EC effect. Thus, explicit generalization effects were observed, but no evidence for displacement effects was found. Furthermore, relative similarity of the lateral objects to the focal object did not moderate the strength of generalization effects. Conceptual and methodological implications for LAC are discussed.