When tolerance leads to intolerance: accessibility effects on social judgment

We investigated the effects of unobtrusively primed constructs that were evocative of tolerance (e.g., tolerant, nonprejudiced) on subsequent task performances and found, contrary to our expectation, contrast effects in the judgment of an ambiguous behavioral description (Study 1 and 2). Suspecting that these results might be the outcome of social-comparison processes, in Study 3, we attempted to corroborate our findings by providing the participants with either an explicit or implicit comparison standard. The results showed that the participants who were provided with the implicit comparison standard evaluated the target behavior as more intolerant as compared to those with the explicit or no comparison standard. The results are discussed in relation to the moderating role of automatic social-comparison processes in the incidence of assimilation and contrast effects and the reduction of prejudice.