Accessibility

Definition

Accessibility refers to the ease with which an idea or concept can be retrieved from memory. Accessible constructs are those that are quickly retrieved from memory. Concepts that are accessible are important because a concept must be activated to be useful in guiding behavior or in influencing judgments. Concepts that an individual has thought about recently or thinks about frequently tend to be more easily retrieved than other concepts. In social psychology, accessibility has often been considered in relation to attitudes. That is, attitudes that come to mind quickly are accessible attitudes. Accessible attitudes are generally stronger, more resistant to persuasion, and more predictive of behavior than are less accessible attitudes.

Background

The study of attitudes has been an important part of the research landscape in social psychology since the early 1900s. Historically, attitudes were thought to be an important topic to study because early researchers assumed that attitudes are strongly related to behavior. However, the assumption that attitudes are reflected in behavior was criticized in 1969 by Allan Wicker, who observed that the bulk of research findings examining the correlation of attitudes to related behaviors found only a weak relationship. Later, as part of the ensuing debate about whether and how strongly attitudes guide behavior, Russell Fazio and colleagues found that accessible attitudes (those that are quickly brought to mind) are more strongly related to behavior than attitudes that take longer to bring to mind.

The concept of accessibility has also been applied to other judgments people make in their everyday lives. Stereotypes of minority groups, for example, can vary in their accessibility. Priming, or presenting stereotyperelated information to make the stereotype more accessible in the short term, has been shown to increase the reliance on stereotypes in making judgments of members of minority groups. Similarly, information that is relevant to a person's self-concept, or that is relevant to the attainment of a goal, tends to be accessible. The accessibility of self-relevant and goal-related information makes that information more likely to be relied on in making judgments.

A classic investigation of the accessibility of social stereotypes was conducted by Tory Higgins and his colleagues in 1977. They conducted an experiment in which they made trait categories accessible by having research participants remember them during an unrelated perceptual task. Afterward, participants read an ambiguous description of a stimulus person. The activated trait categories influenced participants' ratings and descriptions of the stimulus person. This study demonstrated that trait categories that are made accessible through priming are important in the interpretation of social information.

Mechanism

To understand how accessible concepts affect judgments, it is important to understand how concepts like attitudes and stereotypes are represented in memory. Concepts are thought to reside in a semantic network in memory. The mental representation of an object or [Page 2]concept is stored as a node in this network. The network is organized such that related concepts or nodes are linked through associative pathways. These associations, or links, vary in their strength: A strong association is created if a concept is frequently activated with another concept. Strong associations exist among members of categories and the concept of the category. Category members that are highly typical of the category are more strongly associated with the category than less typical members. For example, a robin will have a stronger link to the category label “bird” than will an ostrich. It is efficient to be able to quickly categorize objects that one encounters in the world: It enables quick decisions about whether or not to approach a novel object. Social stimuli appear to be represented similarly, and the categories people use to understand other people are called stereotypes.

...