Country Music as an Unconditioned Stimulus

    Country Music as an Unconditioned Stimulus

    An experiment (N = 68) explored how background music in a realistic web advertisement could condition implicit and explicit attitudes toward a novel brand. Conditioning effects were apparent in both traditional explicit attitude measures and also in the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Further, brand choice was predicted by explicit attitudes, but prediction improved significantly when implicit attitudes were considered. Mood-congruent judgment, demand effects, and conditioning are considered as potential explanations for our results, and we argue that conditioning provides the most parsimonious explanation. Finally, the results are discussed within the context of the associative-propositional evaluation model (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). This model provides a framework for the integration of the implicit attitude construct into the study of consumer behavior.

   In this article country music is considered an unconditioned stimulus, meaning it creates emotional reactions that do not need to be learned. The researchers used classical conditioning by pairing country music with certain brands to see if the positive or negative emotions caused by the music would transfer to those brands. They found that participants' attitudes and choices were influenced by the emotions they experienced while listening to the music, demonstrating how classical conditioning can shape preferences even when people are unaware of it. This study ultimately showed that country music made people feel certain emotions and when those emotions were paired with a brand or product, they were develop either negative or positive feeling towards it. This shows how an unconditioned stimulus (the music) can influence behavior through classical conditioning.

Redker, C. M., & Gibson, B. (2009). Music as an unconditioned stimulus: Positive and negative effects of country music on implicit attitudes, explicit attitudes, and brand choice. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39(11), 2689–2705. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00544.x 

Berg, M. (2026). Classical Conditioning [PowerPoint slides]. PSYC 3324: Psychology of Learning Stockton University.

Berg, M. (2026). Classical Conditioning II [PowerPoint slides]. PSYC 3324: Psychology of Learning Stockton University.