When the Same Prime Leads to Different Effects

Research on priming effects has shown that primes with widely shared associations (i.e., stereotypes) affect the subsequent behavior of people in consistent ways (i.e., acting stereotypically). In this article, we present two experiments that show that the same primed construct can have different effects on the subsequent choices of different groups of people. These differences in effects are attributable to the groups having different prime associations. These results highlight the importance of understanding unique, personal associations to primes and suggest that seg-mentation is also important for predicting nonconsciously influenced choices. Consumers ’ behavior can be influenced by subtle en-vironmental features. One of the most widely studied means for subtly affecting behavior is the use of priming manipulations, whereby action-relevant constructs are made accessible and influence behavior without the actor’s aware-ness (Dijksterhuis and Bargh 2001; Wheeler and Petty 2001). Because these effects are instigated relatively auto-matically on the basis of activated associations, they provid