The momentary realist

Research suggests that people initially take their subjective experience of an object as an accurate reflection of the object's properties, and only s ubsequently, occasionally and effortfully consider; the possibility that th eir experience was influenced by extraneous factors. The two studies report ed here demonstrate that this is role even wizen the extraneous factors are the person's own dispositions. Dispositionally happy and unhappy participa nts were falsely told that they had been subliminally primed with words tha t might have influenced their moods, and were then asked to identify those words. Dispositionally happy participants were more likely than disposition ally unhappy participants to conclude that they had been primed with positi ve words, but only when they made these judgements under time pressure. The results are discussed in terms of correction models of human judgement.