Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society Brief report The fate of activated information in impression formation: Fluency of concept activation moderates the emergence of assimilation versus contrast Rainer Greifeneder 1,2 * and Herbert Bless 2 1 University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands 2 University of Mannheim, Germany Prior research has shown that activated concepts may influence subsequent interpretation and judgmental processes via priming. Building on this evidence, we suggest that the fluency associated with concept activation may determine whether activated content elicits assimilation or contrast. In two experiments, concept activation in a typical priming experiment was rendered fluent or non-fluent. Consistent with hypotheses, fluent concept activation led to assimilation, whereas non-fluent concept activation led to contrast. In their pioneering work on concept priming, Higgins, Rholes, and Jones (1977) reported that a target person named Donald was evaluated more or less positively depending on whether participants had unobtrusively been exposed to trait adjectives signifying persistence or recklessness. Presumably, this was because the ambiguously described Donald (who had, e.g., taken part in a demolition derby) was perceived in line with the activated trait concept, which in turn led to an according assimilation of evaluations (see also, Srull & Wyer, 1979). Since then, the concept of priming generated tremendous amounts of research and gained support not only in impression formation tasks (e.g., Sedikides, 1990; for overviews, see Higgins, 1996; Wyer & Srull, 1989), but also in other domains such as behaviour (e.g., Smeesters, Yzerbyt, Corneille, & Warlop, 2009). Much to our surprise, however, priming has rarely been linked to another very prominent concept in social-cognitive research: the fluency of cognitive processing (e.g., Schwarz, 1998, 2004). Addressing this gap, we propose that the fluency of concept activation may moderate whether subsequent judgments are assimilated to or contrasted against this activated concept. What follows is to substantiate this hypothesis by briefly reviewing the relevant literature on concept priming (for other effects of priming, see, e.g., Fo ¨rster & Liberman, 2007). * Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Rainer Greifeneder, Mikrosoziologie & Sozialpsychologie, Universita ¨t Mannheim, D-68131 Mannheim, Germany (e-mail: greifeneder@uni-mannheim.de). The British Psychological Society 405 British Journal of Social Psychology (2010), 49, 405–414 q 2010 The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk DOI:10.1348/014466609X479699