These experiments assess the degree to which the semantic-congruity effect in comparative judgment can be explained by such expectancy effects as priming, perceptual "set," or strategies used in the task. The first experiment mixed a lexical-decision task with the comparative-judgment task and showed that neither automatic semantic priming nor deliberate preparation can account for the congruity effect. Experiments 2-4 assessed expectancy effects in a different way by presenting the instructions for comparative judgment either before or after the pair to be judged. These experiments included, among other things, a number of safeguards against artifacts in this paradigm. In these three experiments the congruity effect was obtained with both orders of stimuli and instructions, contrary to the prediction of an expectancy hypothesis. The results indicate that when stimuli are not degraded. The semantic-congruity effect depends largely on the relation between the stimuli and the instructions and only to a small degree, if at all, on expectancy.