(Why) Do Big Five Personality Traits Moderate Evaluative Conditioning? The Role of US Extremity and Pairing Memory

Evaluative conditioning (EC), the change in liking towards a stimulus due to its co-occurrence with another stimulus, is key effect social and cognitive psychology. Despite prominence, research on personality differences EC has been scarce. First found stronger among individuals high Neuroticism Agreeableness. However, it remains unclear how robust these moderations are why they occur. In high-powered preregistered experiment heterogeneous sample (N = 511), we moderation by Individuals Agreeableness also showed more extreme evaluations of unconditioned stimuli (USs) accurate memory for pairings, which both combination accounted The was considerably weaker depended type analysis, but independent US pairing memory. Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Openness did not moderate EC. Our findings imply that Agreeableness-based reflect affective processes presumed current propositional memory-based theories. Furthermore, offer important insights into Big Five interindividual evaluation, memory, learning.