• DOI:10.1037//0022-3514.50.2.229
• Corpus ID: 17828723

On the automatic activation of attitudes.

@article{Fazio1986OnTA,
  title={On the automatic activation of attitudes.},
  author={Russell H. Fazio and David M Sanbonmatsu and Martha C. Powell and Frank Kardes},
  journal={Journal of personality and social psychology},
  year={1986},
  volume={50 2},
  pages={
          229-38
        }
}

• R. Fazio, D. Sanbonmatsu, +1 author F. Kardes
• Published 1 February 1986
• Psychology
• Journal of personality and social psychology

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.