Priming of mediators in causal attribution.

According to Kelley, the process of making person, stimulus, and circumstance attributions is based on the three informational criteria of consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness. Two studies were conducted to assess how the relative accessibility of these three process-relevant criteria affected the time required to make the three attributions. Accessibility was manipulated in both studies by giving subjects a recall test (prime) for at least one of the three informational criteria. Subjects in both studies observed a scenario, after which they were primed for one or more of the three criteria and were then asked to scale one of the three attributions. In Experiment 1 (TV = 93), participants were primed for either all three process-relevant criteria or three pieces of attributionally irrelevant information. Thirty seconds after the accessibility manipulation, subjects scaled a person, stimulus, or circumstance attribution. Priming the process-relevant information decreased subsequent attribution decision time relative to the control group. In Experiment 2 (N = 137) participants were primed for consensus, distinctiveness, or consistency, after which they scaled one of the three attributions. As expected, attribution decision times were lower when all three factors were primed (Experiment 1) than when only one of the three factors was primed (Experiment 2). In addition, stimulus and person attributions were made fastest when consensus and distinctiveness, respectively, were primed. Finally, priming cognitive access to a single factor made that factor dominate the scaled attributions. These results lend support to Kelley's model, in that the priming of information presumably relevant to the attribution process reduced the time observers required to make attribution decisions.