Who am I and who are you? Priming and the influence of self versus other focused attention

Recent research has demonstrated that primes can affect self-perceptions, and that subsequent behavior is typically in line with these changed self-perceptions. However, a wide range of other priming effects have been documented, including changes in person perception, motivation, and so forth. The conditions under which a given prime affects the self as opposed to creating one of these other outcomes remains unclear. The present research seeks to offer insight into this question by examining attentional factors as one determinant of whether the self or another target will be biased by a prime. Across two studies, manipulating attention to the self (or an irrelevant target) immediately following a prime produced assimilation in behavior (Experiment 1) and self-perceptions (Experiment 2) when participants thought about themselves, but not an irrelevant target. In addition, when participants thought about an unrelated target, perceptions of this target, but not the self, were changed (Experiment 2). 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Accessible constructs, such as those activated by primes, have a pervasive impact on judgment and behavior. Research has documented priming effects on social judgment (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977), behavior (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), motivation (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996), situation construal (Kay & Ross, 2003), and a range of other outcomes (for review, see Dijksterhuis, Chartrand, & Aarts, 2007). Despite the diverse set of potential effects produced by any given prime, it is still not well understood when one particular outcome should be expected to occur over any other (Bargh, 2006; Wheeler & DeMarree, 2008). For example, when will a prime (e.g., the African American stereotype) change judgments of others (Devine, 1989) versus judgments of the self (DeMarree, Wheeler, & Petty, 2005)? The present work seeks to determine when primes affect selfperceptions. Past research has demonstrated the ability of primes to bias one’s self-perceptions (e.g., DeMarree et al., 2005), a particularly important effect due to the self-concept’s vital role in guiding behavior (Wheeler, DeMarree, & Petty, 2007). For example, participants primed with the concept of aggression (by exposure to the African American stereotype) may come to view themselves as more aggressive, a change which should then affect behavior ll rights reserved. for Attitudes and Persuasion aterial is based upon work raduate Research Fellowship arree), [email protected] (C. (e.g., leading one to react in a hostile manner) in any situation in which self-perceptions are relevant guides to action (DeMarree et al., 2005). Despite the potential importance of understanding this prime-induced self-change, the exact variables that lead to such effects are not yet fully known. In the current research we investigate the salience of the self versus a non-self target as a critical factor in determining whether the self and self-directed behavior will change following exposure to a prime. When the self is salient, processes that foster the disambiguation of the self-concept by prime-activated content (e.g., confusion of prime as self, biased activation of prime-congruent self-content, etc.; see Wheeler et al., 2007) should be encouraged, while attention to a non-self target should interfere with such processes. Based on past work by Kay, Wheeler, and Smeesters (2008), we manipulated the salience of the self by leading participants to focus on either the self or a non-self target after priming. To the extent that attention to any object is critical for a prime to affect perceptions of the object (Kay et al., 2008), then focusing attention on the self should increase the likelihood that a prime will be used to disambiguate the highly complex self-concept, while focusing attention on another target should reduce the likelihood that the primed construct’s accessibility affects self-perceptions. Furthermore, as long as the self is a valid guide for subsequent behavior, focusing attention on the self should also increase the probability of observing behavioral priming effects. In order to test these hypotheses, our studies utilized a paradigm in which we first subliminally primed all participants with a social stereotype and then directed them to focus their thought Behavioral Aggression