When Do Associations Matter? The Use of Automatic Associations toward Ethnic Groups in Person Judgments

Abstract

Previous studies have reported weak correlations between automatic associations toward ethnic minorities and social judgments. The present report argues that automatic associations are more strongly related to social judgments when the amount of processing is low rather than high. The study reported here examined whether automatic associations and self-reported attitudes toward Turkish immigrants in Germany predict judgments about a specific exemplar of this group when need for cognition (NFC) is considered as a moderator. As expected, the relationship between automatic associations and the target judgment increased when NFC decreased. Moreover, the relationship between automatic associations and the target judgment was independent of the self-reported out-group evaluation. Instead, automatic associations contributed significantly to the prediction of the self-reported out-group evaluation when NFC was low. These findings suggest that individuals base their judgments on automatic associations, especially when they are less prone to engaging in effortful cognitive processing.