Something in the way you primed me: belief monitoring when source identification is not possible

It has been shown that subtle contextual primes produce transient changes in stereotypes (Santos et al., 2012), an effect supposedly caused by both activation of the primed trait and failure of belief monitoring. The present research investigated people's ability to avoid the influence of primes. A first pilot experiment used a subliminal-priming paradigm and replicated the contamination found following subtle supraliminal priming (Santos et al., 2012). Experiment 1 made a previous episode of stereotypic assembling highly accessible, immediately before subliminal priming, and found that the primed information ceased to have an effect. Experiment 2 manipulated the diagnosticity of a previous stereotype-assembling episode for stereotype assessment. When the previous assembling episode was perceived as no longer diagnostic of one's beliefs, contamination occurred. The avoidance of mental contamination depends on the accessiblity of stereotypic beliefs but also on its assumed diagnosticity. The working stereotype assembled seems to reflect a compromise between contextual contamination and belief monitoring, setting a functional limit on cognitive malleability of stereotypes.