Automatic vigilance: The attention-grabbing power of negative social information.

TLDR

Automatic stimulus evaluation directs attention toward events that may have undesirable consequences for the perceiver's well‑being. The study tests whether attentional resources are automatically redirected away from an attended task toward undesirable stimuli. Participants named the colors in which desirable and undesirable traits (e.g., honest, sadistic) appeared. Across three experiments, participants exhibited longer color‑naming latencies and greater incidental learning for undesirable traits, diagnosticity explanations were ruled out, and the results support the automatic vigilance hypothesis with implications for person perception and stereotyping.

Abstract

One of the functions of automatic stimulus evaluation is to direct attention toward events that may have undesirable consequences for the perceiver's well-being. To test whether attentional resources are automatically directed away from an attended task to undesirable stimuli, Ss named the colors in which desirable and undesirable traits (e.g., honest, sadistic) appeared. Across 3 experiments, color-naming latencies were consistently longer for undesirable traits but did not differ within the desirable and undesirable categories. In Experiment 2, Ss also showed more incidental learning for undesirable traits, as predicted by the automatic vigilance (but not a perceptual defense) hypothesis. In Experiment 3, a diagnosticity (or base-rate) explanation of the vigilance effect was ruled out. The implications for deliberate processing in person perception and stereotyping are discussed.