| Sumario: | Human likes and dislikes can be established or changed in numerous ways. Three of the most well-studied procedures involve exposing people to regularities in the environment (evaluative conditioning, approach-avoidance, mere exposure), to verbal information about upcoming regularities (evaluative conditioning, approach-avoidance, or mere exposure information), or to verbal information about the evaluative properties of an attitude object (persuasive messages). In the present study, we investigated the relation between, on the one hand, different types of experiment-related beliefs (regularity, influence, and hypothesis awareness) and demand reactions (demand compliance and reactance) and, on the other hand, evaluative learning about novel food brands (Experiments 1 and 2) and well-known food brands (Experiment 2) via persuasive messages, experienced regularities, and verbal information about regularities. Participants were first exposed to an evaluative learning phase and then completed self-reported evaluation ratings, an Implicit Association Test, and a behavioral intention measure. Results indicate that regularity awareness was a necessary condition for most evaluative learning effects. Influence awareness was also a strong moderator of evaluative effects but more so for effects on self-reported ratings. Hypothesis awareness and reactance only weakly moderated evaluative learning, and demand compliance only played an important role for well-known brands. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed. Statement of Limitations: Our study has several limitations that should be considered. We focused on evaluative learning in the context of food brands, which may yield different results with other types of stimuli. Alternative learning procedures and implementations could also lead to different outcomes. Additionally, the study included a limited number of outcome measures, and different measures might yield different results. The correlational design limits our ability to draw causal inferences about the role of experiment-related beliefs. While participants may hold certain beliefs during evaluative learning, this does not confirm that these beliefs caused the learning effects. Future research using experimental manipulations targeting these beliefs could provide clearer insights into causal mechanisms. Moreover, the retrospective measures of beliefs used in our study may not accurately reflect participants' true beliefs during the learning process and could be influenced by factors such as social desirability or memory lapses. Retrospective measures might also capture beliefs formed after the learning procedure or omit forgotten beliefs. Finally, the study's findings are based on a specific sample of Project Implicit volunteers, and further research is needed to assess the generalizability of our results to other populations and settings.
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