At the boundaries of misattribution: Exploring boundary conditions of the positivity-familiarity effect

Project Description

When people need to make judgments under uncertainty they often rely on cues. For example, when trying to answer the question of whether we like a certain object we might rely on the positive feelings that are associated with the fluency of processing familiar stimuli, and therefore judge objects we have encountered before as more positive. Similarly, when we are faced with the question whether we have encountered a specific stimulus before we might rely on the ease of processing that stimulus and interpret fluency as a cue for familiarity. The basic assumption here is that the fluency of processing a stimulus is misattributed to a specific characteristic of that stimulus (e.g., valence, familiarity) and used to answer a question that we are otherwise unsure how to answer. A conceptually related effect is the misattribution of positivity to familiarity (positivity-familiarity effect. The central idea underlying the positivity-familiarity effect is that positive affect serves as a cue to answer the question of whether a stimulus has been encountered before. The positivity-familiarity effect has been found for attractive faces, positive words, and smiling faces which were judged as more familiar compared to less attractive faces, neutral and negative words, and faces with neutral expressions.