Incidentally activated knowledge and stereotype based judgments: A consideration of primed construct-target attribute match

Research on priming suggests that incidentally activated traits (e.g., depe ndence) only influence judgments about applicable targets (e.g., female). I n previous studies that examined this issue, however, the activation of a t rait was confounded with the activation of a specific gender category. It i s unclear whether social applicability effects were from (a) the activation of a socially applicable trait; (b) the activation of a socially applicabl e gender category; or (c) the joint activation of these last two factors. W e report two studies that unconfound these prime types. In Experiment 1, we obtained a priming effect for socially applicable traits only. This influe nce, however, turned out to be contrastive, which we assumed occurred becau se participants had corrected for mental contamination by these traits. Exp eriment 2 tested this idea by manipulating participants' attentional resour ces, in addition to the prime types. As predicted, the activation of social ly applicable traits resulted in contrastive judgments only under the no lo ad condition. These findings are discussed in the wider context of assimila tion and contrast models of person perception.