Final answer:
Advertisers use higher order conditioning to evoke positive emotions towards their products, often by juxtaposing them with pleasant or desirable images or individuals, leveraging classical conditioning principles. They avoid negative associations, such as those arising from scandals involving celebrity endorsers, to preserve the positive conditioned responses they seek to cultivate in consumers.
Step-by-step explanation:
Advertisers often try to use higher order conditioning by pairing images that evoke good feelings with pictures of their products. This technique utilizes the principles of associative learning, particularly classical conditioning. For instance, in advertising, an attractive model (unconditioned stimulus) is associated with a car (conditioned stimulus), leading to the car being perceived as more desirable (conditioned response), as shown in the studies by Cialdini (2008). Implicit emotional conditioning is another aspect where emotional responses are elicited without conscious recall of why these emotions occur, as is often seen with specific smells or songs.
When it comes to preventing undesirable associations, as highlighted when athletes embroiled in scandal are quickly dropped from ad campaigns, it reflects the avoidance of negative associations that could lead to an unconditioned response which is not in favor of the product. The idea is not to have the product evoke negative feelings in potential customers.
Classical conditioning is present in many daily scenarios beyond just basic needs like eating, but also in responses to environmental stimuli such as lightning predicting thunder, leading to a startled response. Key learning processes like acquisition and extinction involve the strengthening and weakening, respectively, of a learned association, while stimulus discrimination and generalization play roles in how specific, or broad the elicited responses are. These principles collectively showcase how cognitive and associative learning are leveraged in advertising to influence consumers' perceptions and behaviors.