Russell H. Fazio

Russell Fazio is Harold E. Burtt Professor of Social Psychology at Ohio State University, where he heads Russ's Attitude and Social Cognition Lab (RASCL). Fazio's work focuses on social psychological phenomena like attitude formation and change, the relationship between attitudes and behavior, and the automatic and controlled cognitive processes that guide social behavior. He then attended graduate school at Princeton University, receiving his Master of Arts in 1976 followed by his Doctor of Philosophy in social psychology in 1978. Fazio et al., designed a novel bean game, in which some beans had associated positive values and some had negative values. Participants must decide whether to eat the bean or avoid it. They found out that subjects had learned the valence of outcomes to be expected for various types of beans during exploration and formed attitudes would generalize to other novel stimuli. Subjects showed better learning for negative beans than for positive beans and then these negative attitudes had a greater effect on generalization. Fazio referred it as "valence asymmetries”. However, Fazio thinks that automatic attitudes activation varies as a function of the strength of object-evaluation association. Fazio did experiments using sequential priming procedure to support his position.

David E. Meyer and Roger W. Schvaneveldt laid the groundwork for Fazio's work on affective priming in 1971 with the development of the lexical decision task. The findings of their experiments indicated that lexical decisions for concepts associated with a prime were facilitated by exposure to the prime (i.e., the presentation of the word “doctor” as a prime facilitated identifying the word “nurse”). These findings and others suggested that concepts associated with a prime are automatically activated from memory up on presentation of the prime, and so the prime acts to facilitate responding to semantically related target words.

In a 1986 paper, Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes expanded the research on automatic activation to attitudes, reasoning that a similar priming effect should be found. To test the idea, attitude objects were used as primes, with evaluative adjectives used as target words. Participants were primed with attitude objects and were instructed to indicate whether the target word they saw meant “good” or “bad” as quickly as possible. The focus of these experiments was on the latency of the judgment and to what extent the judgment was facilitated by the presentation of an attitude object as a prime. This method is similar to a lie detector test. Both the bogus and the bona fide pipelines attempt to measure attitudes without having to deal with the influences of social desirability. Social desirability is when a respondent answers questions so that they will be seen favorably by others.

The bona fide pipeline started as a way to measure how attitudes are activated from memory, then Fazio began testing ways to use the bona fide pipeline to measure racial attitudes. The procedure involves priming, then assessment of a target stimulus, often by pressing one of two buttons on a keyboard. The prime is a word or a picture presented directly before the target. If the subject has the same attitude towards the prime and target, they will be able to categorize the target more quickly. This is called facilitation. If the subject has conflicting attitudes towards the prime and the target, their response time will be slower. An example of facilitation is when a subject who is negatively biased towards African-Americans is able to more quickly categorize negative words as “bad” after being shown a picture of an African-American face.

Fazio used the Modern Racism Scale as an explicit measure of racial biases in his experiments. The validity of Modern Racism Scale as measure of racial attitudes was called into question by the Bona Fide Pipeline results. Subjects who showed less bias on the Modern Racism Scale exhibited more negativity towards Blacks in Fazio's measures. Fazio tested the reactivity of Modern Racism Scale by conducting an experiment where race of the experimenter and whether or not the subject thought the experimenter would see their scores were manipulated. Subjects showed less negative bias towards Blacks on the Modern Racism Scale when they knew their scores would be seen, and their scores dropped even more when the experimenter was Black. The results supported that behavioral experience could facilitate for attitude formation and increase attitude accessibilities.

In 1986, Fazio and his colleagues proposed a model of the attitude-to-behavior process. In this model, behaviors stem from individuals’ perceptions of an attitude object and a situation in which the attitude object is encountered. The degree to which people's attitudes guide their subsequent perceptions of and behavior towards the attitude object is moderated by attitude accessibility. Fazio and Williams conducted an investigation on the 1984 presidential election. The accessibility of attitudes towards two candidates, Reagan and Mondale, was indicated by the latency of responses towards attitudinal inquiries. Subjects, who responded faster, showed greater selective perception and greater attitude and voting-behavior consistency.

Selected publications

Books Petty, R. E., Fazio, R. H., & Brinol, P. (Eds.). (2009). Attitudes: Insights from the new implicit measures. New York: Psychology Press. Fazio, R. H. & Petty, R. E. (2007). Attitudes: Their structure, function and consequences (v. 1). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

Selected journal articles Jones, C. R., Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2010). Evaluative conditioning: The “How” question. In M. P. Zanna & J. M. Olson (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 43, pp. 205–255). San Diego: Academic Press. Han, H. A., Czellar, S., Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2010). Malleability of attitudes or malleability of the IAT? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 286–298. Jones, C. R., Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2009). Implicit misattribution as a mechanism underlying evaluative conditioning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 933–948. Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2009). Political ideology, exploration of novel stimuli, and attitude formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 995–998. Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2008). Interracial roommate relationships: An experimental field test of the contact hypothesis. Psychological Science, 19, 717–723. Fazio, R. H. & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measures in social cognition: Their meaning and use. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297–327. Fazio, R. H. (2001). On the automatic activation of associated evaluations: An overview. Cognition & Emotion, 15(2), 115–141. Dunton, B. C. & Fazio R. H. (1997). An individual difference measure of motivation to control prejudiced reactions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(3), 316–326. Fazio, R. H., Jackson, J. R., Dunton, B. C., & Williams, C. J. (1995). Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial-attitudes – A bona-fide pipeline. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(6), 1031–1027. Fazio, R. H. (1990). Multiple processes by which attitudes guide behavior – The mode model as an integrative framework. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 23, 74–109. Fazio, R. H., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 229–238. Fazio, R. H. & Williams, C. J. (1986). Attitude accessibility as a moderator of the attitude-perception and attitude-behavior relations – An investigation of the 1984 presidential-election. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(3), 505–514. Cooper, J. & Fazio, R. H. (1984). A new look at dissonance theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 17, 229–226. Fazio, R. H., Chen, J. & McDonel, E. C. & Sherman, S. J. (1982). Attitude accessibility, attitude behavior consistency, and the strength of the object evaluation association. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18(4), 339–357. Darley, J. M. & Fazio, R. H. (1980). Expectancy confirmation processes arising in the social interaction sequence. American Psychologist, 35(10), 867–881.