Liking Is for Doing: The Effects of Goal Pursuit on Automatic Evaluation.

Abstract

Findings from 3 experiments suggest that participants who were actively engaged in goal pursuit, compared with those who were not pursuing the goal, automatically evaluated goal-relevant objects as relatively more positive than goal-irrelevant objects. In Experiment 3, participants' automatic evaluations also predicted their behavioral intentions toward goal-relevant objects. These results suggest the functional nature of automatic evaluation and are in harmony with the classic conceptualization of thinking and feeling as being in the service of "doing" (e.g., S. T. Fiske, 1992; W. James, 1890; K. Lewin, 1926) as well as with more recent work on the cognitive mechanics of goal pursuit (e.g., G. B. Moskowitz, 2002; J. Y. Shah & A.W. Kruglanski, 2002).

The malleability of stigmatizing attitudes: Combining imagined social contact with implicit attitude feedback

“…Such an explanation would be in contrast to primary cognitive theorizing (Hughes, Barnes-Holmes, & De Houwer, 2011) which postulate that implicit attitudes − as mental representations − should be stable across time and contexts (Bargh, 1999;Devine, 1989;Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Smith & De Coster, 1999;Wilson et al, 2000). Rather, results from the current study may support the recent assertion that implicit attitudes may be influenced by social and contextual cues (Barden, Maddux, Petty, & Brewer, 2004;BarnesHolmes et al, 2010b;Cullen et al, 2009;Ferguson & Bargh, 2004;Hahn, Judd, Hirsch, & Blair, 2013). Viewing implicit attitudes as adaptive rather than fixed representations may be an important premise for the development of interventions that strive for stigma reduction by addressing both explicitly and implicitly held attitudes.…”

Zeroing in on heroes: A prototype analysis of hero features.

“…First, the data were cleaned by removing outliers that were found to be greater than 3 standard deviations above the mean (Ferguson & Bargh, 2004) for central, peripheral, and decoy stimuli. A total of 50 data points were removed from the original 1716 (3%), resulting in a total of 1666 usable data points for analysis.…”

Implicit attitudes towards children with autism versus normally developing children as predictors of professional burnout and psychopathology

“…Critically however, the effect was only found for the mainstream group, who it could be argued would have relatively weak or even non-existent attitudes towards autism (because the mainstream teachers in the study had little or no contact with such children). Interestingly, Schwartz (2007) noted that the literature on automatic evaluations suggests that people continuously evaluate all stimuli that they encounter (see Bargh, 1997), including stimuli for which no previous attitude has been formed (Duckworth, Bargh, Garcia, & Chaiken, 2002), and these evaluations are highly sensitive to both the current context and the actor's goals (e.g., Ferguson & Bargh, 2004). Insofar as it is more socially acceptable to have a positive rather than a negative attitude towards disability in general, the IRAP performances for the mainstream group may thus have been influenced by individual concerns over such political correctness.…”