Can externally activated trait concepts affect person judgments after encoding?,.

Abstract

Current knowledge accessibility research assumes primed trait concepts to have no biasing effects beyond the encoding stage. In a series of studies, we challenge this assumption. We predict that trait concepts still can influence the person judgments of a predictor who previously stored the target person information through selective retrieval of trait congruent information. Our results consistently reveal assimilation effects when participants are primed with traits at judgment. Moreover, we identify two boundary conditions provide further evidence of the underlying selective retrieval process. First, assimilation effects only occur when stored target person instances apply to the externally activated knowledge and, second, when no prior target person impression is formed.Studies; Prisoner's dilemma game; Real life; Behavior; Altruism; Costly signaling; Research; Judgments; Knowledge; Effects; Information; Processes;