Sequential Priming Measures of Implicit Social Cognition: A Meta-Analysis of Associations With Behavior and Explicit Attitudes

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.