Consequences of priming: Judgment and behavior.

Two experiments investigated the judgmental and behavioral consequences of priming a social category. In the first experiment, assimilation and contrast effects of judgment of a target person's hostility obtained following priming with exemplars of, respectively, moderate and extreme levels of the category hostility. The second experiment replicated these findings and, in addition, demonstrated that subjects then behaved consistently with their evaluations of the target person in a social interaction. The results are discussed in terms of the social interaction literature, with category accessibility serving as a means of creating an expectancy for the target's behavior.

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