ABSTRACT
Most people believe that their judgments are veridical, and the result of a thoughtful, rational process. Clearly, one way of arriving at social judgments is to consider all relevant target information, and to process this information through some sort of controlled cognitive analysis. Both moods and stereotypes can influence social judgments in an automatic manner. That is, stereotype-consistent attributes and mood-congruent information is involuntarily made accessible for a short period of time following activation. Use of stereotypes and moods as a heuristic can be overcome if their potential effects are noted by the perceiver and thereby avoided. Goal or task complexity does not necessarily influence people’s willingness to employ an attention-demanding controlled processing strategy as does personal involvement, although it can.
