After-affects: How automatic evaluations influence the interpretation of subsequent, unrelated stimuli

Abstract Findings from three experiments suggest that participants’ automatic evaluations of subliminally presented objects influenced how they interpreted subsequent, unrelated objects. Participants defined homographs (Experiment 1), categorized objects and people (Experiment 2), and made person judgments (Experiment 3) that all could be disambiguated in either a positive or negative way. Participants’ responses to the ambiguous targets were evaluatively consistent with their automatic evaluations of preceding, semantically unrelated objects. The findings suggest that one’s automatic evaluations can influence deliberate judgments of subsequent stimuli, even when the only shared dimension between the initially evaluated objects and the judged objects is an evaluative one. The implications of these findings are discussed with regard to possible mechanisms of evaluative priming as well as previous research concerning evaluative priming effects on social judgment.

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