Automatic and Controlled Processes in Social Cognition 267brief stimulus presentations (see Bargh & Chartrand, 2000,
for procedural details). Although perceivers are unable to
describe the stimuli to which they have been exposed, they
nevertheless show evidence of priming effects. We have
already described one experiment by Devine (1989) that
showed that subliminal activation of words associated with
the African American stereotype caused perceivers to view
an ambiguously aggressive target as more hostile, compared
to individuals who had not been primed with the stereotypic
concepts. Similar findings have been reported by other re-
searchers (e.g., Bargh & Pietromonaco, 1982), confirming
that priming effects can occur outside of the perceiver’s
conscious awareness.
It is usually assumed that for these assimilative priming
effects to occur, not only must the relevant concept be accessi-
ble, but it must also be applicable (Higgins, 1996). In line with
this proposition, Banaji, Hardin, and Rothman (1993) demon-
strated that priming gender stereotypes resulted in more
stereotypical impressions of ambiguous targets, but only when
the target was a member of the relevant gender group—that is,
activating masculine concepts resulted in the perception of
ambiguous male targets in a more stereotypical manner, but it
largely did not affect perceptions of female targets. Con-
versely, activating feminine concepts resulted in perceiving
ambiguous female targets in a more stereotypical manner, but
it did not affect perceptions of male targets. Although priming
effects do operate under the constraints of applicability, the
processes involved in using or failing to use activated concepts
as a basis for disambiguating social targets appears to operate
largely without any awareness on the perceiver’s part.
It is not inevitably the case that priming results in assimi-
lation to the primed concepts. For example, Herr (1986)
demonstrated that when activated concepts are sufficiently
extreme, they can produce contrast effects. Acontrast effect
is said to occur when an object is judged more extremely
in the direction opposite to the activated concept. For exam-
ple, if an ambiguous target were judged to be significantly
lesshostile after an African American stereotype had been
activated (compared to an unprimed control group), this
would constitute a contrast effect. The mechanism produc-
ing contrast effects involves using the activated concept as a
comparison standard rather than as an interpretive frame.
Thus, in the case of Herr’s research, for example, the target
person is compared to the activated standard and is conse-
quently seen as relatively less hostile, given the extremity
of the standard. The question of whether contrast effects
occur automatically has been a matter of continuing theoreti-
cal dispute (e.g., Martin, Seta, & Crelia, 1990; Stapel &
Koomen, 1998).
Another hallmark of automatic processing is the occur-
rence of unintended effects. The assimilative priming effects
just reviewed certainly meet this criterion of automaticity, be-
cause it is clearly not the case that individuals intend to use
subliminally activated concepts to guide subsequent impres-
sions. Another domain providing compelling evidence for
unintended aspects of impression formation is research on
spontaneous trait inferences. The question at stake in this re-
search concerns whether social perceivers spontaneously
infer that observed behavior implies that the actor has a
corresponding personality trait. In historical models of this
process of dispositional inference (e.g., Jones & Davis,
1965), it was typically assumed that perceivers engage in a
fairly extensive deductive reasoning process to determine the
trait implications of observed behavior, comparing the effects
of the observed behavior with the simulated effects of not
performing it or of performing an alternative option. In con-
trast, more recent research on spontaneous trait inferences
suggests that perceivers automatically infer the trait implica-
tions of behavioral information, even if that is not their con-
scious intention. For example, Winter and Uleman (1984)
presented participants with behavioral descriptions (e.g.,
Billy hit the ballerina) and subsequently asked participants to
recall the presented descriptions with the aid of cues. The
cues were either semantically related to the theme of the de-
scription (e.g., dance) or were related to the trait implications
of the behavior (e.g., hostile). Cued recall performance was
markedly better when trait cues were available. In a different
paradigm, Uleman, Hon, Roman, and Moskowitz (1996)
showed that people spontaneously made trait inferences
when processing behavioral descriptions, even when such in-
ferences actually impaired performance of their focal task. In
this paradigm, participants read behavioral descriptions on a
computer screen. Immediately after the presentation of a de-
scription, a word appeared on the screen and participants had
to indicate whether that exact word had appeared in the pre-
ceding sentence. When the target word was a trait that was
implied by the behavioral description, reaction times were
slower and error rates were higher than they were when the
same target words followed similar descriptions that did not
imply the traits in question. This kind of evidence suggests
that fundamental aspects of social perception can occur quite
spontaneously, without any conscious instigation on the part
of the perceiver.
Trait inferences are but one manifestation of unintended so-
cial cognition. In a growing program of research, Bargh and
colleagues have shown that without the formation of any
conscious intention, primed or salient stimuli can trigger spon-
taneous behavior (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). For