Attributional Effects of Conflicting Chronic and Temporary Outcome Expectancies: A Case of Automatic Comparison and Contrast

Two studies examined the notion that perceivers’ chronically accessible, negative future-event expectancies might serve as an important cognitive context for the interpretation of temporarily primed expectancies. Such a cognitive context should activate more extreme event-outcome categories that subsequently should be used as comparison standards in the dispositional inference process. A final study examined the direct effect of chronically accessible, negative expectancies on judgments of the priming stimuli. The results of all three studies support the notion that the contextually produced extremity of momentary event expectancies resulted in an unaware and highly efficient comparison and contrast process. When participants were aware of the activation of extreme event-outcome categories and had the requisite resources, correction of target judgments occurred.