Sources of Mental Contamination: Comparing the Effects of Self-Generated versus Externally Provided Primes

Social cognition research has closely examined the processes that are involved in the correction for contaminating influences on judgment. Little is known, however, about how a contaminating influence is detected in the first place. To remedy this shortcoming, we propose a source-monitoring perspective on the detection of bias. This framework suggests that contamination is more likely to occur if its source is similar to the target source....