Social behavior is ordinarily treated as being under conscious (if not always thoughtful) control. Howmer, considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that past experience influences judgment in a fashion not introspectively known by the actor. The present conclusion-that attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes have important implicit modes of operation-xtends both the construct validity and predictive usefulness of these major theoretical constructs of social psychology. Methodologically, this review calls for inmased use of indirect measures--which are imperative in studies of implicit cognition. The theorized ordinariness of implicit stereotyping is consistent with r ent findings of discrimination by people who explicitly disavow prejudice. The finding that implicit cognitive effects arc often reduced by focusing judges ' attention on their judg-ment task provides a basis for evaluating applications (such as affirmative action) aimed at reducing such unintended discrimination. Long before they became central to other areas of psycholog-ical theory, concepts of cognitive mediation dominated the anal-ysis of social behavior. The constructs on which this article fo-

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This article reviews the now extensive research literature addressing the impact of accountability on a wide range of social judgments and choices. It focuses on 4 issues: (a) What impact do various accountability ground rules have on thoughts, feelings, and action? (b) Under what conditions will accountability attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify cognitive biases? (c) Does accountability alter how people think or merely what people say they think? and (d) What goals do accountable decision makers seek to achieve? In addition, this review explores the broader implications of accountability research. It highlights the utility of treating thought as a process of internalized dialogue; the importance of documenting social and institutional boundary conditions on putative cognitive biases; and the potential to craft empirical answers to such applied problems as how to structure accountability relationships in organizations. Accountability is a modern buzzword. In education (Fairchild &

Many people were instrumental to the development, execution, and writing of this thesis. Most important among these is my advisor, Richard Shiffrin. His insight and guidance are sprinkled liberally throughout this work. Nearly all the experiments were designed and performed through the hard work and dedication of two students: Keith Lyle and Kirsten Ruys. Their names, as well as Richard Shiffrin’s, appear in a version of this work submitted for publication. Besides those directly involved in the priming studies, there was a supporting cast of characters. Most important amongst these were Karen Loffland and Coralee Sons who made all the red tape melt away. Without the expertise of Bill Wang the technical difficulties would have been insurmountable. The advice and comments of members of the Shiffrin lab, which included Mark Steyvers, David Diller, Denis Cousineau, Amy Criss, Lael Schooler, Rachel Shoup and Peter Nobel, were invaluable. William K. Estes and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers deserve recognition for helpful comments on early drafts of this thesis. I am grateful to my parents, Ernest and Ellen, for bringing me into this world and instilling in me a sense of scientific curiousity. Most important of all, I would like to thank my wife, Christina Anderson, who believed in me

The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

Results of 3 studies support the notion that anchoring is a special case of semantic priming; specifi-cally, information that is activated to solve a comparative anchoring task will subsequently be more accessible when participants make absolute judgments. By using the logic of priming research, in Study 1 the authors showed that the strength of the anchor effect depends on the applicability of activated information. Study 2 revealed a contrast effect when the activated information was not representative for the absolute judgment and the targets of the 2 judgment tasks were sufficiently different. Study 3 demonstrated that generating absolute judgments requires more time when compara-tive judgments include an implausible anchor and can therefore be made without relevant target information that would otherwise be accessible. In current psychological research, 'few phenomena are easier to demonstrate and harder to explain than the so-called anchor-ing effect, a biased estimate toward an arbitrary value considered by judges before making a numerical estimate (Jacowitz & Kahneman, 1995). In one of the best known and most typical anchoring studies I (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), research par-

The authors report results from 5 experiments that describe the influence of emotional states on trust. They found that incidental emotions significantly influence trust in unrelated settings. Happiness and gratitude—emotions with positive valence—increase trust, and anger—an emotion with negative valence—decreases trust. Specifically, they found that emotions characterized by other-person control (anger and gratitude) and weak control appraisals (happiness) influence trust significantly more than emotions characterized by personal control (pride and guilt) or situational control (sadness). These findings suggest that emotions are more likely to be misattributed when the appraisals of the emotion are consistent with the judgment task than when the appraisals of the emotion are inconsistent with the judgment task. Emotions do not influence trust when individuals are aware of the source of their emotions or when individuals are very familiar with the trustee.

The authors propose that people adopt others ’ perspectives by serially adjusting from their own. As predicted, estimates of others ’ perceptions were consistent with one’s own but differed in a manner consistent with serial adjustment (Study 1). Participants were slower to indicate that another’s perception would be different from—rather than similar to—their own (Study 2). Egocentric biases increased under time pressure (Study 2) and decreased with accuracy incentives (Study 3). Egocentric biases also increased when participants were more inclined to accept plausible values encountered early in the adjustment process than when inclined to reject them (Study 4). Finally, adjustments tend to be insufficient, in part, because people stop adjusting once a plausible estimate is reached (Study 5). We have endeavored to show... that thought in the child is egocentric, i.e., that the child thinks for himself without troubling to make himself understood nor to place himself at the other person’s point of view.... If this be the case, we must expect childish reasoning to differ very considerably from ours, to be deductive and above all less rigorous. (Piaget, 1959, p. 1) Children view their perceptions of the world as accurate reflections

Results from four experiments indicate that people expect to enjoy an experience more when it wili foliow a worse experience. We find that consumers expect hedonic contrast effects even when they do not experience such effects. Whereas individuals remember the absence of contrast effects after a short delay (study 1), indivlduais reporting retrospective judgments after a long delay (study 2) recalled that they had experienced contrast effects. These biased memories about contrast effects are eliminated when individuals focus on enjoyment during the experience. The present experiments document the time course of erroneous beiiefs about contrast effects, mechanisms underlying their resistance to change, and the impact of these expectations about contrast effects on consumer choice. Will you enjoy a glass of wine more after sampling an expensive estate-bottled wine or a cheap table wine? This question likely prompts you to consider whether the enjoyment you derive from an initial sample carries over to your evaluation of a subsequent experience (an assimilation

This research focused on the role that higher order structural properties of stereotypic knowledge play in the processing of social information. It is argued that stereotypic assumptions about cause-effect relations provide important constraints for the causal structure underlying the perceiver's subjective representation of social information. Experiment 1 shows how, within the context of a jury decision experiment, the causal structure underlying stereotypic knowledge about African Americans influences the construal of causality in a situation involving a member of that group. Results from 2 additional experiments indicate that this construal effect is based in part on stereotypic knowledge affecting the encoding of the trial evidence instead of on biasing responses at the output stage. The implications of these findings are discussed, and a theoretical framework is offered according to which the application of category knowledge involves not only the matching of stereotypic attributes but also the alignment of structural relations in the environment. The notion that subjective experience goes beyond the bare sensation of stimuli, that we actively construe reality instead of passively registering our environment, has long guided psycho-