Knowledge Bank

Previous research on attitude accessibility has found that accessible attitudes influence both visual and cognitive attention. Smith, Fazio, and Cejka (1996), for instance, found that categories towards which we have accessible attitudes are more likely to be brought to mind when assessing a related object. Research in our lab (Young & Fazio, in prep) has found evidence that not only are categories towards which we have accessible attitudes more likely to be brought to mind, but they are more likely to influence our evaluations of related objects. The current experiment seeks to apply this attitude accessibility phenomenon to a practical domain – that of eating. Can we modify the way people evaluate and decide to eat various foods by making their attitudes toward either food healthiness or food tastiness more accessible? Our experiment found that if participant attitudes toward healthiness are made more accessible, participants do, in fact, make more health-relevant food choices.