Automatic information processing and social perception: The influence of trait information presented outside of conscious awareness on impression formation.

The accessibility of a category in memory has been shown to influence the selection and interpretation of social information. The present experiment examined the possibility that information relevant to a trait category (hostility) presented outside of conscious awareness can temporarily increase that category's accessibility. Subjects initially performed a vigilance task in which they were exposed unknowingly to single words. Either 0%, 20%, or 80% of these words were semantically related to hostility. In an ostensibly unrelated second task, subjects read a behavioral description of a stimulus person that was ambiguous regarding hostility, and then rated the stimulus person on several trait dimensions. The amount of processing subjects gave to the hostile information and the negativity of their ratings of the stimulus person both were reliably and positively related to the proportion of hostile words to which they were exposed. Several control conditions confirmed that the words were not consciously perceived. It was concluded that social stimuli of which people are not consciously aware can influence conscious judgments.