Eye'm lovin' it! The role of gazing awareness in mimetic desires

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Mimetic desire Awareness Joint attention Evaluative learning Attitude formation dual models Effect of attention on affect Recent studies showed that people evaluate objects more favorably when these objects are gazed-at by others, an effect coined as " mimetic desire ". In two studies, we tested whether mimetic desire stems from an automatic form of learning by examining one dimension of automaticity, i.e., people's awareness of the object-gaze association. Participants saw 6 neutral art paintings associated with a female gazing toward two of the paintings, away from two of the paintings, and closing her eyes with respect to the last two paintings. After the exposition phase, participants evaluated the paintings and performed a contingency-awareness test. Importantly, participants' responses on this test were genuinely driven by memory and not by inferences from liking. Results show that participants preferred objects that were gazed-at but only when they were aware of the object-gaze association. Hence, despite the adaptive function of joint attention, its impact on valence acquisition does not seem to qualify as an implicit learning process. Paying attention to the other people's orientation of attention has important developmental and adaptive implications (e.g., Tomasello, 1999). Joint attention requires that two individuals are attending to the same object, based on one individual using the attention cues of the Of importance, joint attention also has evaluative consequences. Objects that are perceived to be gazed-at by others are evaluated more positively than not-gazed-at objects (e. provided evidence that mimetic desire may arise rather spontaneously and independently from experimental demands. These authors presented pictures of dogs' heads along with various peppermint brands and relied on an affective priming task as an evaluative measure. The use of dogs' heads combined with peppermint brands minimized the possibility that participants would form reasoned inferences between the dog head orientation and the brand. The use of an affective priming task reduced the risk that participants would control their evaluative responses in order to match experimental demands. Despite this rather implicit evaluative context, mimetic desire effects were observed: peppermint brands paired with an oriented-toward dog head acquired a more positive valence than not-gazed-at brands. An important question then arises as to whether these effects may stem from an implicit form of learning or whether some level of consciousness is involved in mimetic desires. The latter question is not only critical in …