The Effect of Priming Causal Dimensional Categories on Social Judgments

During an apparent sentence memorization experiment, subjects in Experiments 1 and 2 were unobtrusively exposed to either controllable, uncontrollable, or no causal information. In an ostensibly unrelated second task, subjects read a paragraph about a stimulus person who needed to borrow class notes for reasons ambiguous with respect to causal controllability. Subjects then rated the stimulus person along a number of attributionally-relevant dependent measures. The primary findings were that causal judgments of the target person were consistent with the activated pole of the controllability dimension, with subjects exposed to controllable as opposed to uncontrollable causal information ascribing greater responsibility to the stimulus person, reporting more anger and less sympathy, and being less inclined to offer assistance. In Experiment 3, subjects were primed with either stable, unstable, or no causal information prior to reading an ambiguously presented description of a stimulus person who was experiencing academic difficulties. Subjects exposed to stable rather than unstable causal information perceived the target person's academic difficulties as due to unchanging factors, as likely to be repeated, and to result in academic withdrawal. The implications of these findings for impression formation and attributional processes are discussed.