ATTITUDE/BEHAVIOR PROCESSES

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This application is a request for a Senior Scientist Award. The proposed research has the long-term objective of understanding how attitudes aid individuals in structuring and coping with their social environments. The work centers upon the functional value of attitudes and examines the processes by which attitudes serve to simplify, the behavior of mentally healthy individuals. A model concerning attitudes, their automatic activation from memory, and the processes by which they guide judgments and behavior underlies the proposed research. The model centers upon the strength of the guide judgements association in memory between the attitude object and one's evaluation of the object. Past research has found the strength of this association to determine the accessibility of the attitude from memory--which, in turn, determines the power and functionality of the attitude. Accessible attitudes are thought to simplify the ongoing day-to-day existence of individuals by permitting them to appraise objects easily and quickly without any need for conscious deliberation and, thus, relieving them from some of the demands and stresses of the social environment. A number of projects are proposed as a continuation of the various lines of theoretical and empirical work that have been pursued in the past. Project I centers on tests of the model of attitude-behavior processes in the domain of racial attitudes and prejudice. The experiments employ a novel methodology that provides a valid, unobtrusive estimate of automatically-activated racial attitudes, and an individual difference measure of motivation to control prejudiced reactions. The influence of these automatic and controlled processes on behaviors, and in situations, that vary in the degree to which they provide an opportunity for deliberation and control is examined. Project II concerns the influence of attitude accessibility on the categorization of target persons who can be thought of in multiple ways and in particular, the trait inferences that are made about such targets. Project III seeks to develop an additional, and more broadly usable, methodological tool that can be employed to assess automatically-activated racial attitudes and, hence, further the discipline's understanding of prejudice. Project IV employs the theoretical model and methodological techniques to illuminate some of the origins and consequences of racial attitudes. Additional ongoing research concerning the costs and benefits of accessible attitudes and the possibility of de-automatizing such attitudes also is summarized. The SSA is intended to facilitate (a) the execution of these many and varied projects, (b) the PI's many active collaborations with colleagues from other research institutions, and (c) the PI's continued involvement with the mentoring of Ph.D. students.