On Knowing What You Like and Liking What You Smell: Attitudes Depend on the Form in Which the Object is Represented

Attitudes are learned predispositions to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to a given object. Three studies examined whether responses elicited by an attitude object depend on the form in which the object is mentally represented. Subjects indicated their preferences for odors in response to descriptive labels (a symbolic representation) and in response to unlabeled scratch-and-sniff patches (a perceptual representation). The correspondence between ratings of symbolic and perceptual object representations was substantially lower than the reliability of ratings within either representational domain. Accessibility of attitudes (indexed by judgment times) was increased by prior expression of attitudes within the same representational domain but not by prior expression of attitudes in the other domain. Discussion considers the importance of these results for models of attitude structure and function.