when predicting attitude stability and the corresponding behavior and judgments of those behaviors. Moreover, Gantman and Van Bavel (2014) found evidence for a moral pop-out effect, such that participants were more likely to recognize moral words over nonmoral words in a lexical decision task.

With regard to group evaluations, it has been shown that moral judgments of one’s ingroup are more important than judgments of competence or sociability (Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007). Perceiving one’s ingroup as moral has been shown to lead to more positive outcomes of a group’s self-concept, such that positive moral evaluations of one’s ingroup leads to less distancing from that group and greater group identification (Leach et al., 2007). This line of research further extends to the evaluation of outgroups, with the main finding that moral traits are weighted more heavily when members of one group form impressions about an outgroup (Brambilla et al., 2013a). A limitation of this line of research is its focus on conscious, controlled perceptions of morality. Unconscious perception enjoys an extensive influence on social behavior (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), and as such studying morality at the unconscious level may reveal interesting differences in explicit versus implicit evaluations of outgroups.

While previous research has provided a solid foundation for understanding just how important moral judgments are to individuals, more work needs to be done to fully examine how quickly moral judgments are made. Limited work has studied the role of implicit cognition in moral judgments, though there is reason to believe that moral judgments may be susceptible to nonconscious influences (e.g., Ma, Vandekerckhove, Baetens, Van Overwalle, Seurinck, & Fias, 2012; Willis & Todorov, 2006). Given that judgments of morality are deemed to be more relevant than other traits when judging whether a target represents a threat (Brambilla et al., 2013b; Willis & Todorov, 2006), we contend that research into the implicit attribution of moral personality traits is warranted to delineate whether morality is attributed automatically or through cognitive processes. This led to our first hypothesis, which predicts that participants will be more likely to recognize moral (versus nonmoral) traits

Spontaneous Trait Inferences

A spontaneous trait inference (STI) occurs when an individual makes a nonconscious, unintentional judgment about the character of another individual (Winter & Uleman, 1984). These inferences occur