The Role of Category Accessibility in the Interpretation of Information About Persons: Some Determinants and Implications

Thomas K. Srull, Robert S. Wyer · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 1979 · social-psychology · 10.1037/0022-3514.37.10.1660 · record srull-wyer1979-category-accessibility
tag layer · index · concepts · authors · עברית
Where this record's text came from. faceted 2026-08 by reading the locally held text (corpus-body); every evidence string verified as an exact substring of that text before merging. This record, Higgins et al. (1977) and Collins & Loftus (1975), all three in this corpus, form an explicit citation triangle: Srull & Wyer extend Higgins et al. (1977) and argue against Collins & Loftus (1975), both by name and both quoted above. The Collins & Loftus relation is typed 'contradicts' because the paper argues an interference account is MORE appropriate than spreading activation for this domain - it is a scope disagreement, not a claim that spreading activation is false in semantic tasks; the quote carries that nuance. Replication status = 'replicated' is internal and grounded: the paper describes Experiment 2 as a conceptual replication of Experiment 1 ('The second was a conceptual replication in which concepts related to kindness were primed 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.
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
standard-deviation 3 fields · priming 2 fields · statistical-significance 2 fields · frequency 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 6 concept tags on this paper, 4 are grounded in a quoted sentence. 3 carry the tagger's gloss of what the term means in this paper, which is not something the article can license.
category accessibility social priming impression formation priming encoding halo effect frequency trait judgment impression hostility ANOVA hypothesis-testing p-value standard-deviation standard deviation statistical-significance statistically significant variance behavioural-experiment

Legend

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/10.1037/0022-3514.37.10.1660. The reading view exists for the papers whose licence permits it.

Every tag on this page

claim_relations 2 · claim_type 1 · concept_edges 1 · concepts 4 · content_tags 7 · controls 1 · limitations 4 · method 1 · phenomenon 1 · senses 5

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.

This record holds no mechanisms. A layer is empty when the tagger recorded nothing in it — which is not the same as the paper having nothing to record.

facettagfieldconf.whose words
claim_typemechanism
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_typethe paper's words
phenomenoncategory accessibility in person perception
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phenomenonthe paper's words
methodbehavioural-experiment
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methodthe paper's words
limitationsThe encoding step assumed to mediate the effect was not directly measured.
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limitations[0]the tagger's words
limitationsThe apparent negative priming effect at 24 hours in Experiment 1 is not trustworthy without replication.
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limitations[1]the tagger's words
limitationsThe claim that the same encoding processes operated as in Higgins et al. rests on paradigm similarity, not on data collected here.
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limitations[2]the tagger's words
limitationsOnly two trait concepts were studied, so the hostility/kindness asymmetry needs a broader sample.
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limitations[3]the tagger's words
controlsthe filler items were held IDENTICAL across conditions, so that only the priming items differed
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eliminates: that something else in the sentence-construction task produced the effect · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[0]0.95the tagger's words
conceptscategory accessibility
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[0]the paper's words
conceptspriming
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: priming
concepts[3]0.95the paper's words
conceptsencoding
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: encoding
concepts[4]0.95the paper's words
conceptshalo effect
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: halo effect
concepts[5]0.95the paper's words
sensesTHE AMBIGUITY CONDITION, FOR THE FOURTH TIME AND FROM A FOURTH DIRECTION: `Quotation withheld when the implications of this information are relatively ambiguous.` With higgins1977 (`at least in ambiguous situations`), north1999 (`only when there is an element of UNCERTAINTY`) and money2013 (`a situation that does not leave much room for interpretation`), that is four papers across 1977-2015 and three fields. And here it is not a qualifier in passing: it is one of four summarised findings, and the target behaviours were SELECTED for ambiguity by a separate rating study of 43 subjects before the experiment began
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[0]0.95the tagger's words
sensesFREQUENCY IS A DOSE, AND THE PAPER SAYS SO AS A GENERAL LAW RATHER THAN A RESULT: `Quotation withheld.` Not `in this experiment` - in the past. The claim is that ordinary life is continuously setting accessibility, and the laboratory manipulation is only a controlled instance of something always running. That is a much larger claim than the experiment tests, and it is the one the field inherited
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 DECAY IS SLOW AND INCOMPLETE: `although these effects decrease with the time interval between their activation and the acquisition of information to be interpreted or encoded, they are sometimes detectable even after 24 hours.` A priming effect surviving a day, in a corpus whose other records measure the same word in MILLISECONDS - vorberg2003's time courses, Holcomb2005's 40 ms primes, Huang2018's 16 ms exposure. The same term spans six orders of magnitude of persistence, and `sometimes detectable` is the hedge that keeps this one honest
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[2]0.95the tagger's words
sensesA GRADIENT USED TO RULE OUT A RIVAL ACCOUNT: the priming generalised to traits related to the primed one only indirectly, but LESS strongly - `Quotation withheld produced by exposure to `good` or `bad` concepts on the priming task.` A halo would not respect the distance between traits. The rival is excluded by the SHAPE of the effect rather than by a control condition, which is a cheaper and less common move
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
sensesAND THEY BORROW higgins1977'S MECHANISM EVIDENCE AND MARK THE BORROWING: `Quotation withheld ... Quotation withheld` They lean on Higgins' applicability null - primed traits that were evaluatively toned but INAPPLICABLE had no effect - for the mechanism their own design does not test, name it as a borrowing, and mark the inference tentative in the same paragraph. Both papers are in this corpus and the dependency is now recorded from the borrowing side
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[4]0.95the tagger's words
claim_relationsextends → Higgins, Rholes, and Jones (1977)
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[0]the tagger's words
claim_relationscontradicts → the spreading activation approach of Collins & Loftus (1975) as an account of social priming
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[1]the tagger's words
concept_edgescategory accessibility —causes→ encoding
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direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: THE 'WHEN ... AMBIGUOUS' CLAUSE IS INSIDE THE QUOTE AND IT IS HALF THE CLAIM. An edge reading 'accessibility drives encoding' without it states the 1977-79 result as the unconditional version the field later argued about - and this is the fourth paper in the corpus to name that same condition. Weight 0.9: the paper's own summary of its own finding, in its discussion. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but the span says the effect of accessibility on encoding is more pronounced for ambiguous information; the direction is not stated.
concept_edges[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagscategory accessibility is a major determinant of how social information is encoded in memory and later used for judgments
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsANOVA
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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. THE QUOTE CONTINUES A SENTENCE THAT THIS COPY CUTS IN TWO - a figure, its axis labels and its caption stand between it and the words it follows, which read 'tested statistically by the main effect'.
also in: ANOVA
content_tags.statistics[0]the tagger's words
content_tagshypothesis-testing
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content_tags.statistics[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsp-value
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: p-value
content_tags.statistics[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsstandard-deviation
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[3]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[4]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.
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: variance
content_tags.statistics[5]the tagger's words

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