On the automatic activation of associated evaluations: An overview

A review of the literature concerning the phenomenon known as automatic attitude activation is presented. The robustness of the affective priming effect across many different procedural variations, the mediating mechanisms thought to underlie the effect, and the moderating role of associative strength are discussed. The relevance and importance of automatic attitude activation to many fundamental cognitive and social processes also is highlighted. Finally, an overview of the articles included in this Special Issue of Cognition and Emotion, their essential contributions, and their relation to the earlier literature is presented.     

On the malleability of automatic attitudes: combating automatic prejudice with images of admired and disliked individuals.

Two experiments examined whether exposure to pictures of admired and disliked exemplars can reduce automatic preference for White over Black Americans and younger over older people. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to either admired Black and disliked White individuals, disliked Black and admired White individuals, or nonracial exemplars. Immediately after exemplar exposure and 24 hr later, they completed an Implicit Association Test that assessed automatic racial attitudes and 2 explicit attitude measures. Results revealed that exposure to admired Black and disliked White exemplars significantly weakened automatic pro-White attitudes for 24 hr beyond the treatment but did not affect explicit racial attitudes. Experiment 2 provided a replication using automatic age-related attitudes. Together, these studies provide a strategy that attempts to change the social context and, through it, to reduce automatic prejudice and preference.     

Social attitudes modulate automatic imitation

In naturalistic interpersonal settings, mimicry or “automatic imitation” generates liking, affiliation, cooperation and other positive social attitudes. The purpose of this study was to find out whether the relationship between social attitudes and mimicry is bidirectional: Do social attitudes have a direct and specific effect on mimicry? Participants were primed with pro-social, neutral or anti-social words in a scrambled sentence task. They were then tested for mimicry using a stimulus-response compatibility procedure. In this procedure, participants were required to perform a pre-specified movement (e.g. opening their hand) on presentation of a compatible (open) or incompatible (close) hand movement. Reaction time data were collected using electromyography (EMG) and the magnitude of the mimicry/automatic imitation effect was calculated by subtracting reaction times on compatible trials from those on incompatible trials. Pro-social priming produced a larger automatic imitation effect than anti-social priming, indicating that the relationship between mimicry and social attitudes is bidirectional, and that social attitudes have a direct and specific effect on the tendency to imitate behavior without intention or conscious awareness.     

Social tuning of automatic racial attitudes: the role of affiliative motivation

Consistent with the affiliative social tuning hypothesis, this study showed that the desire to get along with another person shifted participants' automatic attitudes toward the ostensible attitudes of that person. In Experiment 1, the automatic racial attitudes of women but not men emulated those of an experimenter displaying race-egalitarian attitudes or attitudes neutral with respect to race. Mediational analysis revealed that the gender difference in social tuning was mediated by liking for the experimenter. In Experiment 2, the likability of the experimenter was manipulated. Individuals who interacted with a likable experimenter exhibited social tuning more so than did those who interacted with a rude experimenter. These findings suggest that affiliative motives may elicit malleability of automatic attitudes independent of manipulations of social group exemplars.     

The generality of the automatic attitude activation effect.

Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986) demonstrated that Ss were able to evaluate adjectives more quickly when these adjectives were immediately preceded (primed) by attitude objects of similar valence, compared with when these adjectives were primed by attitude objects of opposite valence. Moreover, this effect obtained primarily for attitude objects toward which Ss were presumed to hold highly accessible attitudes, as indexed by evaluation latency. The present research explored the generality of these findings across attitude objects and across procedural variations. The results of 3 experiments indicated that the automatic activation effect is a pervasive and relatively unconditional phenomenon. It appears that most evaluations stored in memory, for social and nonsocial objects alike, become active automatically on the mere presence or mention of the object in the environment.     

On the automatic evaluation of end-states

The author's research examined automatically activated attitudes toward desired end-states. Across 4 studies, participants' automatic attitudes toward goals (i.e., thinness, egalitarianism) significantly predicted their goal pursuit, including behaviors, intentions, and judgments. Such attitudes predicted behavior and judgments that are difficult to monitor and control (i.e., restrained eating, subtle prejudice), but not judgments that are easy to monitor and control (i.e., blatant prejudice). Automatic attitudes toward goals also possessed unique predictive validity compared with explicit measures of motivation and with automatic attitudes toward more physical, "graspable" objects. The findings are discussed with regard to the predictive validity of automatic attitudes, the use of automatic attitudes toward goals as an implicit measure of motivation, and the role of automatic evaluative processes in goal-pursuit and self-regulation.     

Age-related increases in the effects of automatic semantic activation.

Automatic semantic activation was assessed in a version of the flanker task, in which nominally irrelevant words were presented above and below a target word. The category membership of the flanking word was consistent, inconsistent, or neutral with respect to the target word. Older adults showed greater inhibition and equivalent facilitation in the time taken to classify the target words than did younger adults in 2 of 3 experiments, in contrast to previous findings. The present results are generally consistent with 3 dominant perspectives in cognitive aging: the complexity hypothesis, environmental support, and the inhibition-deficit view. Manipulation of the overall magnitude of the flanker effect produced results most consistent with the inhibition-deficit view that older adults are less able to inhibit automatic processes than are younger adults. Some problems with the inhibition-deficit view are also discussed.     

On the automatic evaluation of social exemplars

The present article focuses on the automatic evaluation of exemplars whose category membership has been learned in the past. Studies 1 and 2 confirmed the hypothesis that once an exemplar has been encoded as a member of a given group, at a later encounter the evaluation associated with the group will be unintentionally retrieved from memory, even when no perceptual cue indicates the exemplar's category membership. Study 3 extended the results to the domain of in-group/out-group differentiation. In addition. Studies 4 and 5 confirmed the hypothesis that stored evaluations can be retrieved and affect responses even when the semantic information on which the evaluations were originally based is no longer available for retrieval. Finally, Study 6 investigated spontaneous approach-avoidance behavior tendencies. Overall, results demonstrate the pervasive effects of person-based representations, and they are discussed in terms of recent models of person perception and out-group discrimination.     

On the development of national attitudes in children

The present study consists of three related experiments which are concerned with the development of national attitudes in children between the ages of seven and twelve. It was predicted on the basis of a structural interpretation of Allport's three-stage developmental theory of prejudice that national attitudes will increase at first due to increasing consistency of judgment and decrease afterwards due to cognitive differentiation. The hypothesis is partially confirmed with respect to the attitudes of children towards other countries but not confirmed with respect to the attitudes of children towards people who are perceived as foreigners. A tentative explanation is offered for the last finding. It was shown moreover that the attitudes of older children display more cognitive balance than those of younger children. In connection with the last problem, a quantified modification Bf Heider's theory of balanced states was introduced.     

Limitations of semantic priming procedures for automatic goal activation

According to the auto-motive model, behavioral goals can be automatically activated by situational cues and may subsequently guide behavior without individual awarness. Semantic priming has become a popular paradigm for investigating effects of automatic goal activation. Nevertheless, a critical assumption of the model, i.e., that goals can be activated by semantic primes related to situational features associated with the goal, is often assumed rather than tested in experiments using semantic priming procedures. Results of four studies testing the potential of such a prime for goal activation by assessing emotional responses, subjective goal importance, behavioral intentions, and enhanced perception of goal-related stimuli do not support this assumption. The implications of these findings and a critical evaluation of results of other studies are discussed in terms of possible limitations of semantic priming procedures for testing hypotheses derived from the auto-motive model.     

The automatic and co-occurring activation of multiple social inferences

People make a variety of automatic inferences when observing others' actions. These include inferences about stable dispositions as well as transitory goal states and social situations. However, models of social inference have rarely considered whether different types of automatic inferences can co-occur. We present three experiments in which participants were incidentally exposed to texts depicting behaviors that afforded inferences about actors' traits and the social situations these actors were experiencing. Results from lexical decision and probe-recognition tasks revealed heightened activation of both trait and situational inferences; furthermore, this co-occurring activation was spontaneous, unconscious, and independent of processing resources or specific impression-formation goals. A fourth experiment extended these findings by showing that when participants were asked to make deliberate attributional judgments of the same set of behaviors, typical goal-directed biases reflecting the selection of either trait or situational interpretations emerged. Implications for social inference processes are discussed.     

A role for set in the control of automatic spatial response activation

Spatial stimulus-response (S-R) compatibility effects are widely assumed to reflect the automatic activation of a spatial response by the spatial attributes of a stimulus. The experiments reported here investigate the role of the participant's set in enabling or interacting with this putatively automatic spatial response activation. Participants performed a color discrimination task (Experiment 1) or a localization task (Experiment 2). In each experiment, two different S-R mappings were used and a task-cue indicated the appropriate mapping on each trial. S-R compatibility and the time between the task-cue and target were manipulated, and compatibility effects were assessed as a function of (a) the time between the task-cue and the stimulus, and (b) whether the S-R mapping repeated or switched on consecutive trials. Critically, whether response mappings repeated or switched on consecutive trials determined the relation between compatibility effects and the time between task-cue and stimulus. These results are discussed in terms of an interaction between automatic spatial response activation and the participant's set.     

An empirical investigation of the specificity and sensitivity of the automatic thoughts questionnaire and dysfunctional attitudes scale

Cognitive assessment of depression is not well advanced and the evidence for the validity and reliability of measures is incomplete. This study examined two cognitive assessments of depression-the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (ATQ) and the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale (DAS). There were two major objectives of this study. The first objective was to examine the ability of these two measures of cognitions to discriminate depressive symptomatology within a variety of sample populations-university undergraduate students, medical and psychiatric outpatients, and acute psychiatric inpatients. The second objective was to examine the ability of the ATQ and DAS succesfully to classify depressed and nondepressed patients. The results of this study suggest that the ATQ is a sensitive and specific measure of depression. Nonspecificity to the ATQ, however, was demonstrated in the substance abuse disorder group and the personality disorder group. In contrast, the DAS, although correlated with depressive symptomatology, was not found to be specific to depression.Part of this project is supported by a Special Project Grant from the University of Queensland to Dr. Oei.     

Priming us and them: automatic assimilation and contrast in group attitudes

Social judgment theory holds that a person's own attitudes function as reference points, influencing the perception of others' attitudes. The authors argue that attitudes themselves are influenced by reference points, namely, the presumed attitudes of others. Whereas exposure to a group that acts as a contextual reference should cause attitude assimilation, exposure to a group that acts as a comparative reference should cause attitude contrast. In Study 1, participants subliminally primed with their political ingroup or outgroup endorsed more extreme political positions than did controls. Study 2 demonstrated that prime types known to uniquely facilitate assimilation and contrast enhanced the polarization effect in the ingroup and outgroup conditions, respectively. Study 3 established an important boundary condition for whether group salience produces attitude assimilation or contrast by showing that perceived closeness to the elderly moderates the direction and strength of the group priming effect. The results suggest that the transition from assimilation to contrast occurs when a group ceases to function as a context and becomes a comparison point. Implications for social judgment theory, assimilation and contrast research, and conflict escalation are discussed.     

Distinguishing automatic and controlled components of attitudes from direct and indirect measurement methods

Distinct automatic and controlled processes are presumed to influence social evaluation. Most empirical approaches examine automatic processes using indirect methods, and controlled processes using direct methods. We distinguished processes from measurement methods to test whether a process distinction is more useful than a measurement distinction for taxonomies of attitudes. Results from two studies suggest that automatic components of attitudes can be measured directly. Direct measures of automatic attitudes were reports of gut reactions (Study 1) and behavioral performance in a speeded self-report task (Study 2). Confirmatory factor analyses comparing two-factor models revealed better fits when self-reports of gut reactions and speeded self-reports shared a factor with automatic measures versus sharing a factor with controlled self-report measures. Thus, distinguishing attitudes by the processes they are presumed to measure (automatic versus controlled) is more meaningful than distinguishing based on the directness of measurement.     

Prejudice from thin air: The effect of emotion on automatic intergroup attitudes

Two experiments provide initial evidence that specific emotional states are capable of creating automatic prejudice toward outgroups. Specifically, we propose that anger should influence automatic evaluations of outgroups because of its functional relevance to intergroup conflict and competition, whereas other negative emotions less relevant to intergroup relations (e.g., sadness) should not. In both experiments, after minimal ingroups and outgroups were created, participants were induced to experience anger, sadness, or a neutral state. Automatic attitudes toward the in- and outgroups were then assessed using an evaluative priming measure (Experiment 1) and the Implicit Association Test (Experiment 2). As predicted, results showed that anger created automatic prejudice toward the outgroup, whereas sadness and neutrality resulted in no automatic intergroup bias. The implications of these findings for emotion-induced biases in implicit intergroup cognition in particular, and in social cognition in general, are considered.     

I like you,I like you not: Understanding the formation of context-dependent automatic attitudes

Previous research has shown that automatic evaluations can be highly context dependent. Expanding on past research demonstrating context effects for existing attitudes toward familiar objects, the present research examined basic principles that guide the formation of context-dependent versus context-independent automatic attitudes. Results from four experiments showed that: (a) newly formed attitudes generalised to novel contexts when prior experiences with the attitude object were evaluatively homogeneous; (b) when prior experiences were evaluatively heterogeneous, automatic evaluations became context sensitive, such that they reflected the contingency between the valence of prior experiences and the context in which these experiences occurred; and (c) when prior experiences were evaluatively heterogeneous across different contexts, novel contexts elicited automatic evaluations that reflected the valence of first experiences with the attitude object. Implications for research on automatic evaluation and attitude change are discussed.     

Validity and boundary conditions of automatic response activation in the Simon task.

Three experiments were conducted to determine whether spatial stimulus-response compatibility effects are caused by automatic response activation by stimulus properties or by interference between codes during translation of stimulus into response coordinates. The main evidence against activation has been that in a Simon task with hands crossed, responses are faster at the response location ipsilateral to the stimulus though manipulated by the hand contralateral to the stimulus. The experiments were conducted with hands in standard and in crossed positions and electroencephalogram measures showed coactivation of the motor cortex induced by stimulus position primarily during standard hand positions with visual stimuli. Only in this condition did the Simon effect decay with longer response times. The visual Simon effect appeared to be due to specific mechanisms of visuomotor information transmission that are not responsible for the effects obtained with crossed hands or auditory stimuli.     

On the cued activation of situational motivation

We examined the hypothesis that situational (or state) motivation can generalize from one situation to another via activation by associated cues. In an experimental setting, a neutral cue (a computer tone sequence) was paired repeatedly with controlling feedback. We then assessed the effect of presenting this conditioned cue during a subsequent task on participants’ motivation for that novel task. In two studies we found evidence that cued activation of controlledness significantly undermined participants’ self-determined motivation toward this subsequent task. These findings demonstrate that subtle cues, including contextual primes, can influence people’s motivational state.