Automaticity of chronically accessible constructs in person x situation effects on person perception: it's just a matter of time

Models of Person X Situation influences on social behavior and judgement have invoked two distinct mechanisms: a personality disposition and a situational press. In this study we conceptualized both influences in terms of a single underlying mechanism, construct accessibility. We pitted the characteristic ways that individuals perceive others against situational influences on accessibility (i.e., contextual priming) and tracked over time the relative power of these competing influences on the outcome of an impression-formation task. Subjects possessed either a chronically accessible (chronics) or an inaccessible (nonchronics) construct for either outgoing or inconsiderate behavior. As predicted, as the delay since the priming event lengthened (from 15 to 180 s), chronics were progressively more likely to use the chronically accessible construct instead of the primed alternative construct to categorize an ambiguous target behavior, whereas nonchronics' relative use of the primed and alternative constructs did not change as a function of postpriming delay.