Page 79 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

72 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

The basic cognitive mechanism of priming is accessibility. Accessibility
concerns the fact that recently and frequently activated ideas or attitudes
(in general, knowledge structures) come to mind more easily than ideas
that have not been activated. Recent primes can temporarily increase the
accessibility of a construct, while frequent primes can gradually increase
the applicability of a construct in ways that make the construct chronically
accessible long after exposure to the stimulus (Higgins, 1996; see also
Price & Tewksbury, 1997). Recent exposure to an issue increases tempo-
rary accessibility by momentarily bringing the issue into working memory.
When asked to evaluate a target, considerations already in working mem-
ory are more likely to be used. Frequent exposure makes an issue more
chronically accessible or more generally available. Such chronically acces-
sible issues are more likely to be used in evaluation, regardless of the re-
centness of a stimulus (Althaus & Kim, 2006; Claibourn, 2008).
The key feature of this “automatic” or “nonconscious” knowledge acti-
vation is inescapability (Bargh, 2006; Fazio, 2007). Encountering the at-
titude object activates the associated evaluation without the individual’s
intent and does so even if the individual is attempting to engage in some
other activity. Accessibility also applies to interpreting or evaluating peo-
ple, objects, and ideas, especially when positive or negative valences (e.g.,
traits, concepts, stereotypes, consequences) are primed. However, acces-
sibility alone does not produce knowledge activation, nor does increasing
the accessibility of a construct ensure that it will be used as a criterion in
subsequent judgments. Rather, accessibility is one of two primary factors
moderating the activation of stored knowledge; the other is the degree to
which a stimulus and a knowledge construct are perceived as applicable to
one another (Higgins, 1996). Even if a knowledge construct has a small
chance of being activated because of its diminished accessibility, its chances
of being activated are increased by its perceived applicability or relevance
to a judgmental task.
Furthermore, one of the prevailing conceptualizations of memory struc-
ture in psychology is the associative network memory model developed by
Anderson (1983). According to this model, semantic memory or knowl-
edge consists of a set of nodes and links. Nodes (e.g., political attitudes)
are stored pieces of information connected by links that vary in strength.
A spreading activation process from node to node determines the extent
of retrieval in memory. A node becomes a potential source of activation
for other nodes either when external information is being encoded or
when internal information is retrieved from long-term memory. Activation
can spread from one node to other linked nodes in memory. When the
activation of another node exceeds some threshold level, the information