| phenomenon | automatic activation of attitudes— “The essential question to be addressed is whether attitudes are capable of being activated automatically upon the individual's encountering the attitude object.” |
| claim-type | existence— “We hypothesized that attitudes characterized by a strong association between the attitude object and an evaluation of that object are capable of being activated from memory automatically upon mere presentation of the attitude object.” |
| method — evidence | — “We used a priming procedure to examine the extent to which the mere presentation of an attitude object would facilitate the latency with which subjects could indicate whether a subsequently presented target adjective had a positive or a negative connotation.” |
| builds-on | Fazio, Chen, McDonel & Sherman (1982), Fazio, Powell & Herr (1983) and Powell & Fazio (1984) on attitudes as object-evaluation associations— “In a recent series of experiments concerning attitude accessibility, Fazio and his colleagues (Fazio, Chen, McDonel & Sherman, 1982; Fazio, Powell, & Herr, 1983; Powell & Fazio, 1984) proposed that attitudes be viewed as simple associations between a given object and a given evaluation.” | claim_relations[0] |
| builds-on | Neely's (1977) semantic priming investigation and its short- versus long-SOA pattern— “This finding is reminiscent of one from Neely's (1977) investigation.” | claim_relations[1] |
| builds-on | past research employing the repeated attitudinal expression manipulation (Powell & Fazio, 1984)— “Such a null effect of repeated expression on attitude extremity is consistent with past research that has employed the repeated attitudinal expression manipulation.” | claim_relations[2] |
| sense | AN ATTITUDE BECOMES A QUANTITY WITH A NAMED ZERO: `attitudes as evaluative associations with objects. These associations can vary in strength, ranging from not existing at all (the case of a nonattitude) to a weak association that is unlikely to be capable of automatic activation to a strong association that can be activated automatically.` 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— “These associations can vary in strength, ranging from not existing at all (the case of a nonattitude) to a weak association that is unlikely to be capable of automatic activation to a strong association that can be activated automatically” | senses[0] |
| sense | A 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— “However, 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” | senses[1] |
| sense | THE MODERATOR IS BOTH MEASURED AND MANIPULATED, WHICH IS THE STRONGEST FORM THE CLAIM COULD TAKE: `Regardless of whether this associative strength was measured or manipulated experimentally, evidence of automatic activation of the attitude was far stronger when the association could be characterized as strong.` 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— “Regardless of whether this associative strength was measured or manipulated experimentally, evidence of automatic activation of the attitude was far stronger when the association could be characterized as strong” | senses[2] |
| sense | AND THE PAPER CLAIMS AFFECT WORKS LIKE MEANING, EXPLICITLY: `they indicate that affect can be activated automatically from memory in the same way that has been demonstrated previously for semantic knowledge.` 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`— “they indicate that affect can be activated automatically from memory in the same way that has been demonstrated previously for semantic knowledge” | senses[3] |
| control | a block of practice trials used DIFFERENT words from those serving as primes — held — rules out that the practice block primes the critical items before the experiment begins— “Subjects' performance of this task was preceded by a block of practice trials involving different words than those used as the potential primes, so as to familiarize subjects with the procedure.” | controls[0] |
| control | subjects were required to RECITE the prime aloud — held — rules out that a null or weak priming effect is a failure of ATTENTION - a subject who never processed the prime cannot be primed by it— “Subjects were told to recite the memory word, that is the prime, solely to ensure that they attended to the prime.” | controls[1] |
| effect direction | associative strength —causes→ automatic activation — increases— “Regardless of whether this associative strength was measured or manipulated experimentally, evidence of automatic activation of the attitude was far stronger when the association could be characterized as strong”— “evidence of automatic activation of the attitude was far stronger when the association could be characterized as strong” | concept_edges[0] |
| note | associative strength —causes→ automatic activation — 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.— “Regardless of whether this associative strength was measured or manipulated experimentally, evidence of automatic activation of the attitude was far stronger when the association could be characterized as strong” | concept_edges[0] |
| weight | associative strength —causes→ automatic activation — 0.9— “Regardless of whether this associative strength was measured or manipulated experimentally, evidence of automatic activation of the attitude was far stronger when the association could be characterized as strong” | concept_edges[0] |
| outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation) | control — held | controls[0] |
| outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation) | control — held | controls[1] |
| replication | replicated |
| limitation | In Experiments 1 and 2 associative strength was measured rather than manipulated, so the two classes of attitude may differ in other ways.— “Nevertheless, as is the case any time a conceptual variable is measured rather than manipulated, other differences might exist between the two classes of attitudes that were identified via our measurement technique.” | limitations[0] |
| limitation | The inhibition produced by weak negative primes in Experiment 1 did not replicate in the later experiments.— “However, this effect should be interpreted cautiously because, unlike the effect observed for strong primes, it does not replicate in the later experiments to be reported.” | limitations[1] |
| limitation | The control primes of Experiment 3 were not equivalent to the weak primes of the first two experiments.— “Due to the selection requirement concerning unanimity, the control attitude objects in Experiment 3 involved stronger evaluative associations than did the weak primes in Experiments 1 and 2.” | limitations[2] |
| limitation | Whether the priming procedure works as an unobtrusive attitude measure has not been tested.— “Whether the present technique is actually useful in measuring attitudes concerning objects or issues for which self-reports might be suspect remains to be tested.” | limitations[3] |