of pairings. Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to support this result as well. In the IAT, four categories were pleasant and unpleasant items, positive conditioned stimuli and negative conditioned stimuli. Subjects easily associated pleasant items with positive conditioned stimuli and easily associated negative items with negative conditioned stimuli and they found that responding to incompatible pairs was harder. Evidence altogether suggested that attitudes can be conditioned without awareness. Affective priming and automatic attitudes There has been a long dispute between Fazio and John Bargh about under what conditions automatic attitudes are activated. In Bargh's opinion (1992), automatic attitudes activation is a general and pervasive phenomenon. Most evaluations stored in memories are activated automatically on the mere presence of the social or nonsocial object. 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. In three experiments, Fazio and his colleagues found evidence for automatic attitude activation, as well as evidence for facilitation. Participant responding was faster on trials where the primed attitude objects matched the connotation of the target words: for example, if participants were primed with the attitude object “cockroach”, they were quicker to