Consequences of Priming: Judgment and Behavior

Two experiments investigated the judgmental and behavioral consequences of priming a social cate-gory. In the first experiment, assimilation and contrast effects of judgment of a target person's hostil-ity 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 interac-tion. 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. A considerable amount of research evidence supports the no-tion that the expectations held by an individual regarding the behavior of a target person determine, to a great extent, the con-tent of the social interaction between the two individuals. In game settings, subjects who thought that their partner disliked them (Jones & Panitch, 1971) or who were led to believe that their partner was a generally hostile person (Snyder & Swann, 1978) behaved significantly more competitively toward tha