The Additive Nature of Chronic and Temporary Sources of Construct Accessibility

Both temporary and long-term sources of construct accessibility have been found to play an important role in person perception and memory. Yet the two effects heretofore have been studied in isolation from each other. We examined the joint influence of long- and short-term sources of accessibility on impression formation. Subjects with or without a long-term, chronically accessible construct for either kindness or shyness were exposed subliminally to either 0 or 80 trait-related words in a first task. Next, subjects read a behavioral description that was ambiguously relevant to the primed trait dimension, and they then rated the target on several trait scales. For both the kind and the shy trait conditions, both chronic accessibility and subliminal priming reliably and independently increased the extremity of the impression ratings. The results supported a model in which long- and short-term sources of accessibility combine additively to increase the likelihood of the construct's use. Moreover, the subliminal priming effect appeared to be a quite general and pervasive phenomenon, insofar as it occurred for both an evaluatively positive and an evaluatively neutral trait dimension and for subjects without as well as with a chronically accessible construct for the primes. Implications of these findings for the nature of construct accessibility and the generality of automatic influences on social perception are discussed.