On the automatic activation of attitudes.

TLDR

The study hypothesizes that attitudes with a strong association between an object and its evaluation can be automatically activated by merely presenting the object. Using a priming paradigm, the authors measured how quickly participants identified the valence of target adjectives after presenting attitude objects, manipulating and pre‑measuring the strength of object‑evaluation associations across three experiments. Results show that attitudes with strong object‑evaluation links are automatically activated, leading to faster target adjective judgments, and the study discusses implications for attitude function, stability, behavior, and measurement.

Abstract

We hypothesized that attitudes characterized by a strong association between the attitude object and an evaluation of that object are capable of being activated from memory automatically upon mere presentation of the attitude object. We used a priming procedure to examine the extent to which the mere presentation of an attitude object would facilitate the latency with which subjects could indicate whether a subsequently presented target adjective had a positive or a negative connotation. Across three experiments, facilitation was observed on trials involving evaluatively congruent primes (attitude objects) and targets, provided that the attitude object possessed a strong evaluative association. In Experiments 1 and 2, preexperimentally strong and weak associations were identified via a measurement procedure. In Experiment 3, the strength of the object-evaluation association was manipulated. The results indicated that attitudes can be automatically activated and that the strength of the object-evaluation association determines the likelihood of such automatic activation. The implications of these findings for a variety of issues regarding attitudes--including their functional value, stability, effects on later behavior, and measurement--are discussed.