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On the automatic activation of attitudes.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|February 1, 1986
Summary
Strongly held attitudes activate automatically upon mere exposure to the attitude object. The strength of the object-evaluation association directly influences this automatic attitude activation, impacting behavior and measurement.
Area of Science:
- Social Psychology
- Cognitive Psychology
Background:
- Attitudes are fundamental to human cognition and behavior.
- The automaticity of attitude activation remains a key research question.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether attitudes automatically activate upon mere presentation of an attitude object.
- To determine the role of the object-evaluation association strength in automatic attitude activation.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a priming procedure across three experiments.
- Assessed reaction times for evaluating target adjectives following attitude object primes.
- Manipulated and measured the strength of object-evaluation associations.
Main Results:
- Demonstrated significant facilitation in adjective evaluation when primes and targets were evaluatively congruent.
- Confirmed that this facilitation occurred only when the attitude object had a strong evaluative association.
- Showed that manipulating association strength influenced the degree of automatic activation.
Conclusions:
- Attitudes can be automatically activated from memory.
- The strength of the association between an attitude object and its evaluation is a critical determinant of automatic activation.
- Findings have implications for understanding attitude function, stability, and measurement.