Consequences of priming: Judgment and behavior.

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the judgmental and behavioral consequences of priming a social category. In the first experiment, assimilation and contrast effects of judgment of a target person's hostility obtained following priming with exemplars of, respectively, moderate and extreme levels of the category hostility. The second experiment replicated these findings and, in addition, demonstrated that subjects then behaved consistently with their evaluations of the target person in a social interaction. The results are discussed in terms of the social interaction literature, with category accessibility serving as a means of creating an expectancy for the target's behavior.A considerable amount of research evidence supports the notion that the expectations held by an individual regarding the behavior of a target person determine, to a great extent, the content of the social interaction between the two individuals. In game settings, subjects who thought that their partner disliked them (Jones & Panitch, 1971) or who were led to believe that their partner was a generally hostile person (Snyder & Swann, 1978) behaved significantly more competitively toward that person than when such an expectancy was not present. Kelley and Stahelski (1970) found that subjects who expected their partners to be competitive behaved in a more competitive manner as well. In each case, subjects' expectancies of another individual were manipulated and the subject holding that expectancy came to act differently toward the target person.The effects of expectancies on social interactions are not confined to game situations. Word, Zanna, and Cooper (1974) found that, in the context of an interracial interview, black "job applicants" received shorter interview times, greater physical distancing, and higher rates of speech errors from white interviewers than did white applicants. Snyder, Tanke, and Berscheid (1977) demonstrated that men's beliefs that women who were physically attractive would be warmer and more sociable than physically unattractive women resulted in different behavior to a female target in a telephone conversation.All of these studies provide evidence that individuals' expectations indeed affect the nature of a behavioral interaction. Whether the expectancy was formed in the lab by an experimenter or held by the subject before, the social interaction with This article is based on a doctoral dissertation conducted at Indiana University and supported by an Indiana University doctoral dissertation grant.I would like to thank the members of the dissertation committee,

Chronic and temporary distinct expectancies as comparison standards: Automatic contrast in dispositional judgments.

“…Although numerous models have been offered to explain the processes underlying such effects (Helson, 1964;Manis & Paskewitz, 1984;Ostrom & Upshaw, 1968;Sherif & Hovland, 1961), the more recent and integrative social-cognitive models (e.g., Herr, 1986;Schwarz & Bless, 1992) have focused on categorization processes as critical determinants of the direction of influence of contextual information.…”

Naming is framing: the public understanding of scientific names

“…Second, we turn our attention to comparison effects. Comparison effects relate to categorization theory because knowledge about familiar concepts can be used in different ways to give meaning to unfamiliar concepts (Herr, 1986;Higgins, 1989). The last theory we discuss is the theory of need for cognitive closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994), which has the potential to explain individual differences between respondents in how they use categorization to give meaning to new concepts.…”

“…Categorization plays an important role in the way attitudes are influenced by the context, not only through the categorization itself, but also by the way activated categories are used for evaluation (Herr, 1986). Especially when people experience ambiguity towards a concept, attitudes can be influenced by the context in which it is reported (Higgins, 1989).…”

“…When a concept is presented in a presentation context which is not regarded as suitable to give meaning to an unfamiliar concept, the presentation context can act as a standard for comparison (Herr, 1986). For example, when genomics is presented in a context with traditional breeding and it is believed that genomics is a form of GM because of categorization by name, people will be inclined to compare genomics with the context.…”

“…A name acts as a label guiding people to a particular schema, which in turn acts as a frame when processing information (Ferguson & Bargh, 2004;Herr, 1986;Higgins, 1996). Once this schema becomes activated, people pay more attention to the attributes that are part of the schema, disregarding those that are not (Rajagopal & Burnkrant, 2009), which also determines what people will remember (Sedikides & Skowronski, 1991).…”