The impact of opposites:Implications of trait inferences and their antonyms for person judgment

This research investigates the similarities and differences between the impact of priming trails and the impact of priming their antonyms. The findings of five studies demonstrate that person judgments may be affected not only by priming descriptively relevant traits, but also by primes that are antonyms of these traits. The direction of the effect of activating traits versus antonyms is dependent on (1) whether the trait inferences are descriptively relevant or irrelevant and evaluatively moderate or extreme, (2) whether they refer to behavior labels or person descriptions, and (3) whether they activate information that overlaps with the dimension on which the target is to be judged. Implications for models of knowledge accessibility are discussed, (C) 2000 Academic Press.