Understanding spontaneous trait inferences and spontaneous trait transference, the associability of primed trait constructs

The present research explored whether inhibitory mechanisms derived from latent inhibition (LI) can interfere with stereotype expression. In particular, five studies explored whether irrelevant pre-exposure to attractive and unattractive individuals influenced selective attention mechanisms to subsequently guide attention away from stimulus features related to attractiveness. Inherent in this logic is the notion that if attention is guided away from stimulus features related to attractiveness, biased interpretations and discriminatory responses resulting from the activation of evaluations and stereotype content associated with attractiveness may be circumvented. Study 1 demonstrated LI using the attractiveness of perceived individuals as the target stimulus. Participants who had experienced irrelevant pre-exposure to attractive and unattractive individuals had more difficulty subsequently learning a contingency based on attractiveness than participants who had no such pre-exposure. Study 2 revealed that irrelevant pre-exposure to attractive and unattractive individuals subsequently interferes with automatic activation of evaluations on the basis of attractiveness when indexed by an evaluative priming procedure. Studies 3 and 4, however, revealed that irrelevant pre-exposure to attractive and unattractive individuals failed to moderate the influence of attractiveness on explicit personality judgments. One possible reason for this disparity in effects is that processes evoked by the person perception task rendered attractiveness very salient, and this salience may call attention back to this construct even when LI has guided attention away from it. It was also possible, however, that the stimulus conditions created by the presentation of stereotype target traits in combination with clearly attractive and unattractive faces was responsible for the failure of LI to mitigate stereotype expression. Study 5 explored this issue using a modified evaluative priming procedure that included stereotype and non-stereotype traits as target words. LI interfered with the automatic activation of evaluations under these stimulus conditions. This finding suggests, therefore, that the failure to observe a moderating effect of LI on explicit personality judgments may have been caused by specific processes evoked during the person perception task. Findings are discussed in terms of how chronic cognitive associations pertaining to stereotypes interact with attentional mechanisms in social judgment processes., Individual-trait associations formed during the comprehension of behaviour descriptions are typically believed to be the result of spontaneous inferential processes. The autopriming and associability theory, an alternative explanation for the phenomenon of spontaneous trait inferences (STI) and spontaneous trait transference (STT), suggests that trait constructs spontaneously primed during behaviour identification may passively become associated with salient stimuli available in working memory (e.g. actors, other individuals) independent of inferential processes. A modified savings in relearning paradigm was used to test the theory's prediction of a positive relationship between stimulus salience and association strength. Although the effect of stimulus salience only approached significance, the trends observed were consistent with predictions and were interpreted as supporting the autopriming and associability theory. In addition, the fact that STI and STT induced individual-trait associations were of equal strength further suggests that both types of associations are the result of the passive associative process described by the autopriming and associability theory.