The primacy of the social: The role of accessibility and trait domain in automatic information processing

Much of the information people process about others is related to social or competence-related characteristics. Of these trait domains, social-related information should be of primary importance because sensitivity to such information should be an evolved adaptation for complex social exchanges. Consequently, social-related information is likely to be chronically accessible in memory. This dissertation assessed whether or not social-related concepts were indeed more chronically accessible in memory than competence-related concepts and examined the implications that such differences in accessibility have for automatic information processing.;Study 1 examined whether or not social-related concepts were more accessible in memory than competence-related concepts using a lexical decision task. Participants were presented social or competence-related trait words or non-words on a computer screen and were asked to identify whether each letter string was a word or non-word. Consistent with expectations, people responded fastest to words related to social characteristics, especially words that were negative in valence. Study 2 examined how the differences in accessibility might affect automatic information processing. In an affective priming task, participants judged whether social or competence-related words had positive or negative connotations. Before judging each target, participants first viewed a prime that activated either a positive or negative attitude. The results indicated that when highly accessible negative social traits were used as targets, reverse priming occurred instead of the affective congruency effect typically found in affective priming tasks. In Study 3, the accessibility of the targets in an affective priming task was manipulated by using words that were high or low in frequency of occurrence in English. Target accessibility was also manipulated by asking participants to repeatedly express their attitude toward a subset of the target words. The results showed that high frequency targets (high accessibility) led to the reverse priming effect, whereas low frequency targets (low accessibility) led to the affective congruency effect. Manipulation of accessibility through repeated expression was not successful. Study 4 examined the mechanism that underlies the relationship between target accessibility and reverse priming. The findings were discussed in terms of their implications for automatic information processing and interpersonal perception.