SOCIAL CATEGORIZATION AS A FUNCTION OF PRIMING

The present study investigates the effect of priming on the use of soc ial categorizations. Using sex and race as stimulus categorizations, p revious studies failed to confirm the hypothesis that priming one of t he two available categorizations would enhance the use of the primed c ategorization relation to the not-primed categorization. As suggested by Stangor, Lynch, Duan and Glass (1992), a momentary increase in acce ssibility may be insufficient to further enhance the use of highly acc essible categorizations like race and sex, but it may be expected that priming will increase the use of categorizations which are less habit ually used in daily life. The results of the present experiment suppor t the hypothesis that, when the stimulus categorizations are weakly ac cessible (university major, university town), the relative use of the previously primed categorizations does indeed increase, compared to th e alternative, not-primed, categorization.