Moderation of priming by goals: Feeling entitled to judge increases judgedusability of evaluative primes

Two studies investigated how social goals moderate priming effects on judgm ent. Strong motivation to judge was hypothesized to compensate for the low judged usability (see Higgins, 1996) of a general evaluative activation fol lowing nonapplicable priming. Supporting this hypothesis, the results of tw o experiments showed that when participants felt entitled to judge, either because they were led to believe that they were expert at judging others' p ersonality (Study 1) or because they thought they had received more informa tion about the target (Study 2), their judgment was evaluatively congruent with the primed nonapplicable categories. However, their judgment was not i nfluenced by prior exposure to nonapplicable primes when they were in a mor e standard situation. Discussion focuses on the notion of judged usability, the way it is influenced by social goals and norms, and its relationship w ith other concepts in the literature. (C) 2000 Academic Press.