# Attribute Conditioning is insensitive to cue competition and is not predicted by the Big Five Personality Traits

## TL;DR

This study shows that pairing people with healthy or unhealthy foods influences how healthy they are perceived, regardless of other factors or personality traits.

## Contribution

The study demonstrates that attribute conditioning is robust and unaffected by cue competition or Big Five personality traits.

## Key findings

- People paired with healthy foods were rated as healthier than those paired with unhealthy foods.
- There was no evidence that cue competition or personality traits influenced the attribute conditioning effect.
- Females showed a stronger attribute conditioning effect than males.

## Abstract

When a neutral stimulus is paired with a stimulus denoting an attribute, the neutral stimulus inherits that attribute (i.e., Attribute Conditioning; AC). The current experiments examined whether this effect is sensitive to cue competition, specifically blocking (Experiment 1, n = 245) and overshadowing (Experiment 2, n = 213), and whether personality traits can predict this effect (n = 458). Participants were shown cartoon images of people (CSs) paired with healthy or unhealthy foods (USs) and completed the Big Five Inventory. An AC effect was evident—people paired with healthy foods were rated healthier than people paired with unhealthy foods. However, there was no evidence of cue competition or personality traits impacting the AC effect, although females displayed a stronger AC effect than males. These findings indicate that AC is a robust phenomenon of relevance to social learning processes but is insensitive to factors that influence other forms of conditioning.