CATEGORIES OF CATEGORY ACCESSIBILITY - THE IMPACT OF TRAIT CONCEPT VERSUS EXEMPLAR PRIMING ON PERSON JUDGMENTS

Social cognition and judgment research addressing the impact of catego ry accessibility on person judgments suggests that this impact may dep end on the kind of information that is activated. Some priming stimuli (trait concepts, nonperson exemplars) are more likely to exert their influence during the interpretation stage of impression formation. Oth er priming stimuli (person exemplars) may especially exert their effec ts during judgment because they are sufficiently similar to the target to serve as a relevant comparison standard. It is posited that when p rimed category information is used as an interpretation frame, assimil ative judgments of ambiguous stimuli are more likely. When category in formation is used as a comparison standard, contrastive judgments of b oth ambiguous and well-known stimuli are more likely, provided the pri med information is sufficiently extreme. In four studies we test these hypotheses and further specifications by manipulating the comparison relevance and distinctness of the priming stimuli (trait concepts, per son exemplars, nonperson exemplars), the extremity of the priming stim uli (moderate, extreme), and the ambiguity of the target stimuli (ambi guous, well known). Implications of these results for previous and fut ure research on knowledge accessibility are discussed. (C) 1997 Academ ic Press