A Study of How We Perceive People

In a now classic study, Srull and Wyer (1979) found that by priming participants with hostility related stimuli in a sentence unscrambling task caused subsequent judgment of a person (Donald) behaving ambiguously to be perceived as more hostile. As part of a larger, multi-lab collaborative study conducted by Randy McCarthy, the purpose of this study is to replicate the findings found in Srull and Wyer (1979) by focusing on two conditions that demonstrated a clear priming effect, the use of 30 sentences in the sentence unscrambling task and the immediate testing condition. Participants first completed a sentence unscrambling task, followed by the reading of a brief vignette about a man named Donald behaving ambiguously hostile and then rated him on a set of personality traits. As an indicator of hostility, we examined ratings of three traits (hostile, unfriendly, and dislikeable) to create an average hostility score for participants of both groups. Participants in the experimental group who descrambled mostly hostile sentences rated Donald as 0.18 points more hostile than did those who descrambled neutral sentences. Analysis found these results not to be significant. Results indicated a significant interaction for the trait rating of dislikeable, females in the control group rated the trait more negatively compared to males in the control group. To provide additional context for the results in our sample, we re-analyzed data from three external samples in this multi-site project. Results from all samples suggest that the currently used methods do not produce a hostile priming effect as detected in the original Srull and Wyer (1979) study