The Twenty Statements Test (TST) was administered in Seoul and New York, to 454 students from 2 cultures that emphasize collectivism and individualism, respectively. Responses, coded into 33 categories, were classified as either abstract or specific and as either autonomous or social. These 2 dichotomies were more independent in Seoul than in New York. The New York sample included Asian American whose spontaneous social identities differed. They either never listed ethnicity-nationality on the TST, or listed it once or twice. Unidentified Asian Americans' self-concepts resembled Euro-Americans' self-concepts, and twice identified Asian Americans' self-concepts resembled Koreans' self-concepts, in both abstractness-specificity and autonomy-sociality. Differential acculturation did not account for these results. Implications for social identity, self-categorization, and acculturation theory are discussed.
Three studies tested the hypothesis that assimilation of impressions to primed constructs is a product of relatively superficial processing and is unlikely to occur when behavioral information about a target person is processed systematically. In Study 1, the impressions of accuracy-motivated Ss did not assimilate to covertly primed trait constructs, although the impressions of unmotivated Ss did. Studies 2 and 3 showed that when Ss become accuracy motivated after exposure to target information, both retrieval of that information and opportunity for effortful processing of it were necessary to eliminate assimilation effects. In addition, accuracy-motivated Ss showed no special attention to primes or awareness of their influence on judgment. Even when one is unaware of the potential biasing influence of primed constructs, they often may not bias impression formation, so long as available target information is processed systematically.Imagine a manager who needs to decide whether to promote an employee to an important stock-trading position-a job that requires taking reasonable, but not foolish, risks. The manager starts to review the employee's record at home one evening, but is tired and the file offers no clear picture of the employee's risktaking tendencies, so the manager decides to review it at work the next day. On the way to the office the next morning, the manager is almost run off the road by a speeding driver. What implications might this event have for the manager's later evaluation of the employee? Research on social perception provides some clues.
Construct Accessibility and Social JudgmentResearch on category accessibility effects has demonstrated that when people encode social stimulus information that is applicable to competing, alternative trait constructs, whichever construct has a higher state of "activation" will "capture" the Editor's Note. I gratefully acknowledge Eliot R. Smith, who served as ad hoc action editor on this article.
Three experiments obtained evidence that spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) occur on-line, at encoding. In each, participants read many sentences on a computer screen. After each paragraph, they indicated whether it included a test probe word. Paragraphs that imply but do not contain traits should increase errors or reaction times (RTs) to trait probes. In Experiment 1, trait-implying paragraphs produced more errors than control paragraphs, supporting the hypothesis. In Experiments 2 and 3, with feedback on each trial, longer RTs supported the hypothesis. STIs had the same effects as McKoon and Ratcliff's "predicting inferences. " Unexpectedly, participants gained control over STIs and predicting inferences, so that RT differences (and error differences in Experiment 1) declined over trials. Analyses of reading times in Experiment 3 ruled out several alternative explanations. Results demonstrate that social inferences can occur spontaneously at encoding and suggest that immediate feedback may make control possible.
The priming literature has documented the influence of trait terms held outside of conscious awareness on later judgment relevant to the primed trait dimension. The present research demonstrated that spontaneous trait inferences can serve as self-generated primes. In Experiment 1, Ss instructed to memorize trait-implying sentences (thus spontaneously inferring traits outside of consciousness) showed assimilation effects in judgment. Ss instructed to form inferences from these sentences (thus consciously inferring traits) showed contrast effects. Experiment 2 demonstrated that these findings were due to semantic activation rather than to a general evaluative response. When evaluatively inconsistent trait constructs were primed, similar patterns of assimilation and contrast were found. Implications for the ubiquitous occurrence of priming through the process of social categorization are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.