A limitation to the design used in Experiment 1 and the studies conducted by
Greenlees and colleagues (e.g., 2008) is the dependency of different ratings, given
one after the other, for one and the same presentation. That is, the results do notprovide sufficient evidence for the assumption that certain nonverbal behaviors
trigger a certain athlete schema and may instead demonstrate a person’s need
to avoid cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Specifically, it would be odd if
participants formed a negative impression of a target player and then subsequently
rated the player as being more likely to score a penalty. Therefore, to address this
limitation and to test whether the pattern of results found in Experiment 1 can be
explained further within the schema/category–driven theory of impression formation
(Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Kunda, 1999), we used the IAT (Greenwald et al., 1998).