On the Automatic Activation of Attitudes

Russell H. Fazio, David M. Sanbonmatsu, Martha C. Powell, Frank R. Kardes · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 1986 · social-psychology · 10.1037/0022-3514.50.2.229 · record fazio1986-attitudes
tag layer · index · concepts · authors · עברית
Where this record's text came from. faceted 2026-08 by reading the locally held text (pdftext); every evidence string verified as an exact substring of that text before merging. Claim type is 'existence' because the central contribution is establishing that automatic attitude activation occurs at all; the moderating role of associative strength is a mechanism claim carried in the same abstract sentence, so the two shapes are entangled here. Replication status is 'replicated' only on internal evidence: the paper states that the 300 ms findings of Experiment 2 replicate Experiment 1, and Experiment 3 reproduces the pattern with strength manipulated rather than measured. No external replication is reported. 2026-08-19 and 2026-08-25 schema-0.3 passes: every quote verified as an exact substring of the staged text and anchored at merge time; concept terms verified present; every edge endpoint an existing node.
The quality of the text these quotes were cut from. corrupt-text-layer: extraction inserted spaces inside words (attitud e, th e, b y); scanned APA PDF, no clean OA source. Not enriched.
How to read this page. The article itself is not reproduced here — this paper is not cleared for redistribution, so what follows is the tag layer alone. The evidence sentences are withheld with the article. The table at the foot lists every tag the record carries; each row names the facet it belongs to, and the whose words column says whether the tag records the paper's own wording or the tagger's sentence about the paper. Every tag links to each other paper in the corpus carrying it. The machine-readable edition of the same thing is the TEI file beside this one, where the tags live in standOff, and the article is at its publisher via the link below. When we have changed our mind. Some entries in the table begin with a word in capitals and the reason for it. EVIDENCE CORRECTED — the finding still stands, but we had quoted the wrong sentence from the paper, and the quotation has been replaced with the right one. RETRACTED — the entry itself was wrong; it stays on the page, marked, with the reason, rather than being deleted. WITHDRAWN AND REPLACED — the entry was wrong, and a corrected version of it appears in the entries below. Each mark carries its own reason, in brackets, because the reasons differ from one entry to the next. An entry we have WITHDRAWN is removed from this page and kept in the record, with its reason. A line reading Audit and a date is a later re-reading of the entry against its whole sentence: DOUBTFUL means it was kept, and the reason says what is loose about it. Quotation marks inside the tagger's sentence. Where a tag is the tagger's own sentence, a phrase in quotation marks inside it is borrowed from the paper — the tagger's wording around it is not. The paper's own sentence is the evidence quote for that row; on this page it is withheld with the article, and the article is at its publisher. Nothing inside quotation marks anywhere on this page is ours: if it is quoted, it is the paper's. Whose words a concept carries. A concept entry records a term the paper itself uses, so the term, the sense given for it, and its evidence are the paper's own words, quoted where the paper fixes them. This is the opposite of a sense entry in the tag table, which is the tagger's sentence about how the paper uses a term. Where a concept entry could not be grounded in the paper's words, the entry says so on its own row.
Other fields define these differently the same word, defined another way in another discipline
priming 2 fields · statistical-significance 2 fields · variance 2 fields

Tags on this paper

Every tag the record carries, each linking to every other paper in the corpus that carries it. A tag appears here whether or not its words occur in the article — the spans below are only the ones a sentence in this paper licenses. Of the 9 concept tags on this paper, 4 are grounded in a quoted sentence. 2 carry the tagger's gloss of what the term means in this paper, which is not something the article can license.
priming affective priming automatic activation attitude association secondariness modulation associative strength nonattitude ANOVA analysis of variance p-value statistical-significance statistically significant variance behavioural-experiment

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relation to other workclaim_relationshow this paper stands to another: agrees, contradicts, extends, qualifies
claim typeclaim_typethe shape of the claim: existence, mechanism, method, critique, prediction, null
concept edgeconcept_edgesan asserted relation between two concepts, with the sentence asserting it
conceptconceptsan idea the paper works with, quoted where the paper uses it
content tagcontent_tagsa finding, definition, quantity, statistic or variable named in the paper
controlcontrolsan experiment run to eliminate a rival explanation
limitationlimitationswhat the paper says its evidence cannot support
methodmethodhow the paper produced its evidence
phenomenonphenomenonthe effect or regularity under study
sensesensesa distinct use of a term, quoted where the paper fixes it

The paper

The full text is not reproduced here. This article is not cleared for redistribution, so the page carries the tag layer only. Its evidence sentences are withheld; the grounding status remains with each tag, and the article itself is at https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.50.2.229. The reading view exists for the papers whose licence permits it.

Every tag on this page

claim_relations 3 · claim_type 1 · concept_edges 1 · concepts 4 · content_tags 4 · controls 2 · limitations 4 · method 1 · phenomenon 1 · senses 4

Relations on this page carry a quotation for the claim. Where a relation was separately evidenced — and so tested against the vocabulary for its type — the row says so; none of 1 relation here carry that mark. The rest are the tagger’s reading of the sentence quoted beside them.

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facettagfieldconf.whose words
claim_typeexistence
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claim_typethe paper's words
phenomenonautomatic activation of attitudes
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phenomenonthe paper's words
methodbehavioural-experiment
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methodthe paper's words
limitationsIn Experiments 1 and 2 associative strength was measured rather than manipulated, so the two classes of attitude may differ in other ways.
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limitations[0]the tagger's words
limitationsThe inhibition produced by weak negative primes in Experiment 1 did not replicate in the later experiments.
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limitations[1]the tagger's words
limitationsThe control primes of Experiment 3 were not equivalent to the weak primes of the first two experiments.
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limitations[2]the tagger's words
limitationsWhether the priming procedure works as an unobtrusive attitude measure has not been tested.
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limitations[3]the tagger's words
controlsa block of practice trials used DIFFERENT words from those serving as primes
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eliminates: that the practice block primes the critical items before the experiment begins · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[0]0.95the tagger's words
controlssubjects were required to RECITE the prime aloud
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eliminates: that a null or weak priming effect is a failure of ATTENTION - a subject who never processed the prime cannot be primed by it · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[1]0.95the tagger's words
conceptsautomatic activation
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concepts[2]the paper's words
conceptsattitude
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also in: attitude
concepts[3]the paper's words
conceptsassociative strength
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concepts[7]0.95the paper's words
conceptsnonattitude
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: nonattitude
concepts[8]0.95the paper's words
sensesAN ATTITUDE BECOMES A QUANTITY WITH A NAMED ZERO: `attitudes as evaluative associations with objects. Quotation withheld.` An attitude stops being something a person has or lacks and becomes a link with a magnitude. Everything else in the paper follows: if it is an association, its strength is measurable, manipulable, and predictive of whether it fires unbidden - and `nonattitude` gives the theory a prediction at the bottom of the scale as well as the top
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senses[0]0.95the tagger's words
sensesA FIFTH KIND OF BOUNDARY CONDITION - A PROPERTY OF THE STORED REPRESENTATION: `the likelihood of such automatic activation of an attitude appears to depend upon the strength of the association between the attitude object and the evaluation.` The corpus now holds five places a priming effect can be conditional: the OUTCOME SITUATION (ambiguity - four papers), the OBSERVER (prime visibility, Holcomb2005), the STIMULUS (contains a face, Huang2018), the RELATION between primes (conflict, buchner2003), and here the stored representation itself. Each needs a different remedy when a replication fails - change the task, screen the subjects, change the materials, redesign the trial structure, or select the items
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[1]0.95the tagger's words
sensesTHE MODERATOR IS BOTH MEASURED AND MANIPULATED, WHICH IS THE STRONGEST FORM THE CLAIM COULD TAKE: `Quotation withheld.` Experiments 1 and 2 identified pre-existing strong and weak associations; Experiment 3 created them. The measured version alone would be confounded with anything that makes an object memorable or familiar; the manipulation rules that out, and the agreement between the two is the argument
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senses[2]0.95the tagger's words
sensesAND THE PAPER CLAIMS AFFECT WORKS LIKE MEANING, EXPLICITLY: `Quotation withheld.` A bridge between two literatures, stated by the paper itself - the semantic priming of meyer1971 and neely1977 and the affective priming this paper starts are claimed to be one mechanism running on different contents. `Just as activation can spread from one node in the network to another ... the present data indicate a spontaneous spreading of activation from the object to the affective association`
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[3]0.95the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → Fazio, Chen, McDonel & Sherman (1982), Fazio, Powell & Herr (1983) and Powell & Fazio (1984) on attitudes as object-evaluation associations
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claim_relations[0]the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → Neely's (1977) semantic priming investigation and its short- versus long-SOA pattern
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claim_relations[1]the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → past research employing the repeated attitudinal expression manipulation (Powell & Fazio, 1984)
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claim_relations[2]the tagger's words
concept_edgesassociative strength —causes→ automatic activation
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direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: THE STRONGEST-EVIDENCED EDGE ON THIS RECORD, BECAUSE THE SPAN CARRIES BOTH OPERATIONS: 'MEASURED or MANIPULATED…'. A correlational moderator would be confounded with familiarity; the manipulation rules that out, and the quote says both were done. Weight 0.9 rather than 0.95 because 'evidence ... was far stronger' is a statement about evidence rather than about effect size.
concept_edges[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsANOVA
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also in: ANOVA
content_tags.statistics[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsp-value
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about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.
also in: p-value
content_tags.statistics[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsstatistical-significance
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.
content_tags.statistics[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsvariance
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: variance
content_tags.statistics[3]the tagger's words

Interpretive choices

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