Attributional effects of conflicting chronic and temporary outcome expectancies: A case of automatic comparison and contrast

Two studies examined the notion that perceivers' chronically accessible, ne gative future-event expectancies might serve as an important cognitive cont ext for the interpretation of temporarily primed expectancies. Such a cogni tive context should activate more extreme event-outcome categories that sub sequently should be used as comparison standards in the dispositional infer ence process. A final study examined the direct effect of chronically acces sible negative expectancies on judgments of the Priming stimuli. The result s of all three studies support the notion that the contextually produced ex tremity of momentary event expectancies resulted in an unaware and highly e fficient comparison and contrast process. When participants were aware of t he activation of extreme event-outcome categories and had the requisite res ources, correction of target judgments occurred.