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

This research investigates the similarities and differences between the imp act of priming trails and the impact of priming their antonyms. The finding s of five studies demonstrate that person judgments may be affected not onl y by priming descriptively relevant traits, but also by primes that are ant onyms of these traits. The direction of the effect of activating traits ver sus antonyms is dependent on (1) whether the trait inferences are descripti vely relevant or irrelevant and evaluatively moderate or extreme, (2) wheth er they refer to behavior labels or person descriptions, and (3) whether th ey activate information that overlaps with the dimension on which the targe t is to be judged. Implications for models of knowledge accessibility are d iscussed, (C) 2000 Academic Press.