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Fair and dependent versus egoistic and free: effects of semantic and evaluative priming on the ‘Ring Measure of Social Values’
Author(s) -
Hertel Guido,
Fiedler Klaus
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0992(199801/02)28:1<49::aid-ejsp845>3.0.co;2-h
Subject(s) - psychology , priming (agriculture) , associative property , social psychology , trait , prime (order theory) , cognitive psychology , botany , germination , computer science , biology , mathematics , combinatorics , pure mathematics , programming language
Two experiments investigated the influence of priming trait concepts associated with cooperation versus competition on cooperative choices in the ‘Ring Measure of Social Values’. While models of associative memory explain priming effects on immediate associative responses, they fail to provide a sufficient account for the impact of priming on deliberate, voluntary behaviours, because the same activated concepts (e.g. ‘strong’, ‘profit’, ‘success’) may foster opposite behavioural tendencies (i.e. raise competitive impulses or remind the individual of a cooperation norm). The hypothesis is proposed and tested that the evaluative component of the prime stimuli moderates the behavioural tendency (approach versus avoidance) elicited by the semantic priming component. Accordingly, Experiment 1 shows that both positively toned concepts linked to cooperation as well as negatively toned concepts linked to competition lead to increased cooperative choices. Experiment 2 demonstrates that simple, invariant properties of the prime stimuli are more readily extracted than more complex, interactive prime relations. In general, the priming effects are confined to subjects who lack a consistent, pre‐experimental value orientation. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.