Sequential Priming Measures of Implicit Social Cognition

Abstract

In a comprehensive meta-analysis of 167 studies, the authors found that sequential priming tasks were significantly associated with behavioral measures ( r = .28) and with explicit attitude measures ( r = .20). Priming tasks continued to predict behavior after controlling for the effects of explicit attitudes. These results generalized across a variety of study domains and methodological variations. Within-study moderator analyses revealed that priming tasks have good specificity, only predicting behavior and explicit measures under theoretically expected conditions. Together, these results indicate that sequential priming—one of the earliest methods of investigating implicit social cognition—continues to be a valid tool for the psychological scientist.