A Quantitative Analysis of the Relationship between Personality Factors and Behavior Following an Evaluative Priming Procedure

Abstract

The nature of priming has been discussed in both the cognitive and social psychological literature. In addition, the importance of personality factors as they relate to behavior has been investigated since the days of Sigmund Freud. However, little research has been done to examine how personality factors predict the priming effect one will display. The present study was designed to fill this void by examining the predictive value of one’s personality (as measured by the NEO-FFI-3) as it pertains to the magnitude of behavioral responses (as measured by teacher-evaluation forms) after an evaluative priming procedure. Specifically, the effects of a scrambled sentence test on the participant’s responses to a teacher-evaluation-form were analyzed using Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) with the personality scores obtained on the NEO-FFI-3 used as covariates. Lastly, the implications that these results have for the priming literature will be discussed.