In Visceral Control: When Visceral States Facilitate versus Inhibit Priming Effects

Despite the abundance of priming effects identified in the literature, the replicability of prior findings pertaining to several priming effects has been recently challenged. Therefore, research has focused more extensively on pinpointing boundary conditions under which priming effects might surface or be attenuated. We contribute to this stream of literature, showing how visceral states (“hot” affective states) moderate the effectiveness of priming procedures. We demonstrate that active visceral states inhibit the effectiveness of primes that are unrelated to this state in decision domains that are also unrelated to this state (e.g., hungry people primed with the color orange making non-food related product choices). More importantly, extending the direct implications originating from previous research, we provide evidence that unrelated primes can still influence judgment and decision-making in judgment domains that are related to the visceral state when such a state is still experienced (e.g., hungry participants primed with the color orange making food-related rather than non-food-related product choices). The present research thus presents a nuanced view on when seemingly unrelated primes may or may not be expected to yield downstream consequences on judgment and choice.