Use of an ESP Cover Story Facilitates Reinforcement Without Awareness

Abstract

Participants were exposed to 3 conditions in a betweengroups design. Participants were told the experiment was about extrasensory perception and were asked to select the word from a pair of words that they thought the experimenter was thinking about. In 1 condition selections of the word with a double letter were reinforced with positive verbal feedback, and in another condition selections of nondouble letters were reinforced. The word selections of a control group were reinforced according to a random and predetermined order. By the end of the experimental session, participants who were reinforced for selecting a particular type of word, double letter or nondouble letter, selected that word significantly more than the alternative that was not associated with reinforcement and those participants in the control group selected the double-letter and nondouble-Ietter words equally often. In a postexperimental questionnaire none of the participants reported an awareness of the contingency. The present experiment replicates and extends previous work and confirms that participants' behavior can be modified by reinforcement without the participants' conscious awareness of the contingency.

A double-blind randomized clinical trial on the suggestive effect of anxiety management questionnaires in dental emergencies

“…Psychological questionnaire studies regularly use cover stories to initially disguise the true background of a study. In this way, the response tendencies of the subjects to social desirability can be circumvented ( Bizo and Sweeney, 2005 ; Coultman-Smith, 2008 ). Consent to participate could be withdrawn at any time without giving reasons.…”

Toward an “Awareness” of the Relationship between Task Performance and Own Verbal Accounts of that Performance

“…(p. 1) This quote describes a phenomenon that has been called "learning without awareness." Many authors have investigated this phenomenon using a variety of techniques and experimental tasks including: reinforcing verbal responses (e.g., Lieberman, Sunnucks, & Kirk, 1998;Philbric & Postman, 1954); reinforcing certain categories of words (e.g., Bizo & Sweeney, 2005;DeNike, 1964;Greenspoon, 1955;Lieberman, Connell, & Moos, 1998;Rosenfeld & Baer, 1970;Wilson & Verplanck, 1956); artificial grammar (e.g., Reber, 1967); target location (e.g., Bullemer, Willingham, & Nissen, 1989;Lewicki, Czyzewska, & Hoffman, 1987;Stadler, 1989); affective judgments (e.g., Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980;Lewicki, 1986); and serial reaction time tasks (e.g., Hartman, Knopman, & Nissen, 1989;Willingham & Goedert-Eschmann, 1999). While the present paper is concerned with operant behaviors, interested readers should see Lovibond and Shanks (2002) for a review of the literature concerning "awareness" and Pavlovian conditioning.…”