376 Iv. COGNITI vE AND M OTIvATIONAL P ROCESSES
Given that accessible hostile thoughts pre -
dict anger/aggression and that agreeable peo -
ple are less aggressive, it is natural to won -
der whether people higher in agreeableness 
have less accessible hostile thoughts. This is 
in fact a fairly straightforward translation of 
social-  cognitive models of aggression, which 
posit a kind of “chronic” (baseline) thought 
accessibility to account for individual differ -
ences (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Hig -
gins, 1996). To examine possible relations 
between agreeableness and hostile thought 
accessibility, Meier and Robinson (2004) 
created a categorization task that required 
people to recognize blame-  relevant words 
as quickly as possible, as blame is a major 
predictor of anger and aggression (Shaver, 
1985). In fact, agreeableness was not cor -
related with blame speed (controlling for a 
neutral task); that is, agreeable people were 
equally skilled blamers as disagreeable peo -
ple.
Importantly, though, agreeableness inter -
acted with the blame accessibility measure 
to predict everyday experiences of anger and 
aggression (Meier & Robinson, 2004, Study 
1). At low levels of agreeableness, anger and 
aggression varied straightforwardly with 
blame accessibility: The higher the blame 
accessibility, the greater the anger and ag -
gression. At high levels of agreeableness, 
on the other hand, there was no relation -
ship between blame accessibility and daily anger (see Figure 17.2) or aggression. Par -
ticularly noteworthy in the latter case was 
that agreeable people were low in anger and 
aggression even when their blame accessibil -
ity levels were very high. Furthermore, such 
interactions were conceptually replicated in 
a second study, which also included a prim -
ing manipulation of hostile thoughts: Such 
thoughts translated into anger for people 
low in agreeableness, but not high in agree -
ableness. These results suggest that agree -
able people are capable of self-  regulating the 
influence of their hostile thoughts, whether 
chronic (Study 1) or automatically activated 
(Study 2).
A weakness of the Meier and Robinson 
(2004) studies was that they did not capture 
self- regulatory tendencies in action. Meier, 
Robinson, and Wilkowski (2006) sought 
to do so using a sequential priming task in 
which the question was what would happen 
to the accessibility of prosocial thoughts 
(i.e., thoughts related to caring and help -
ing) following hostile primes (e.g., words 
like blame  or criticize ). A straightforward 
prediction is that hostile primes would tend 
to undermine, or reduce, the accessibility of 
prosocial thoughts, much as hostility and 
warmth inhibit each other in circumplex 
terms (Gurtman, 2009). This pattern was 
evident at low levels of agreeableness. On 
the other hand, people higher in agreeable -
ness were actually faster  to recognize proso -
FIGURE 17.2. Daily anger as a function of agreeableness and blame speed accessibility. Based on Meier 
and Robinson (2004).1.551.61.651.71.751.81.851.9
Low Accessibility High AccessibilityDaily Anger LevelsLow Agreeableness High Agreeableness