The automaticity of interpreting Automaticity.

Abstract

havioral routines (Barsalou, 1993) and social psychologists' automatic attitude activation (Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992;Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, & Hymes, 1996) invite comparison with classic studies of operant conditioning without awareness (Hefferline, Keenan, & Harford, 1959;Sasmor, 1966). These diverse research programs converge on the inescapable conclusion that environmental context serves an essential function in the meaningful interpretation of behavior, regardless of the actor's awareness of or ability to articulate this context.Given the substantial volume of research cited by the authors of the recent American Psychologist articles and the seemingly incontestable documentation of behavioral automaticity, one wonders why such a series, along with the dialogue it is sure to provoke, has been so long in coming in psychology. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the title, "The Unbearable Automaticity of Being," of Bargh and Chartrand's (June 1999) lead article. No doubt to many psychologists the notion that people are neither voluntary nor rational architects of their own behavior is indeed unbearable and would most assuredly meet with resistance. It seems in fact a pretty safe bet that psychology will remain as reticent to abandon the notion of personal agency as evolutionary thinkers are to let go of the myth of progress.

The N400 and Late Positive Complex (LPC) Effects Reflect Controlled Rather than Automatic Mechanisms of Sentence Processing

“…While, in theory, there may be a continuum between automatic and controlled processes [14,44,45,46,47,48,49], and although our experimental design with four degradation levels was in part based on this view, the pattern of the N400 effect was rather in agreement with a dichotomic perspective [22,43]. Indeed, this effect was rather stable among DL0, DL1, and DL2 and disappeared at DL3.…”

“…Yet, a dichotomy between controlled and automatic processes may not exist [14,44,45,46,47,48,49]. Rather, there may be a continuum of processes at different levels of awareness and attention (e.g., [50,51,52]) or on other dimensions as those proposed by Logan [53].…”