What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior

Abstract

Priming or nonconscious activation of social knowledge structures has produced a plethora of rather amazing findings over the past 25 years: priming a single social concept such as aggressive can have multiple effects across a wide array of psychological systems, such as perception, motivation, behavior, and evaluation. But we may have reached childhood's end, so to speak, and need now to move on to research questions such as how these multiple effects of single primes occur (the generation problem); next, how these multiple simultaneous priming influences in the environment get distilled into nonconscious social action that has to happen serially, in real time (the reduction problem). It is suggested that models of complex conceptual structures (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), language use in real-life conversational settings (Clark, 1996), and speech production (Dell, 1986) might hold the key for solving these two important 'second-generation' research problems.Priming effects are ubiquitous in the social psychological literature these days. Nearly all forms of social representation can be primed, it seems-activated incidentally or unobtrusively in one context, to influence what comes next without the person's awareness of this influence. The original research focused on how the passive activation of trait categories in one situational context carried over to influence social judgments in subsequent, ostensibly unrelated contexts (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977;Srull & Wyer, 1979). For example, exposing experimental participants to words related to 'kindness' as part of a purported 'language study' caused them to subsequently view a target person as more kind, compared to the impressions formed of the target by a control group (Srull & Wyer, 1979). These priming effects were understood as single concepts or categories 'capturing" the behavioral input in a competition with other, input-relevant concepts, with this categorization or construal of the input serving as the basis for subsequent, consciously-made judgments.The past 25 years have seen amazing empirical advances in our knowledge of the kinds of psychological concepts and processes that can be primed or put into motion nonconsciously. Social norms (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003;Hertel & Kerr, 2001) to guide or channel behavior within the situation; goals to achieve high performance, to cooperate with an opponent, or to be fair minded and egalitarian (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001;Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999); emotions that shape our reactions and responses to subsequent, unrelated stimuli (Lerner, Small, & Loewenstein, 2004); and of course, knowledge structures such as stereotypes and trait constructs for use in the comprehension and encoding of often ambiguous social behavior (see Bargh, 1989;Higgins, 1996, for reviews). And social behavior itself can be produced nonconsciously in the same fashion (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996;Chartrand & Bargh, 1999;Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998 Still more recently, ...

The magic spell of language: Linguistic categories and their perceptual consequences.

“…In fact, the principle that the content of language may affect the content of cognition and behavior is at the core of one of the hallmarks of modern social psychology: semantic priming effects. Social-psychological priming studies (for reviews, see Bargh, 2006;Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Higgins, 1996) show how the semantic content of language affects the content of specific thoughts and associations (as tapped by cognitive-activation measures), evaluations (as tapped by judgment tasks), and behaviors (as tapped by observational measures).…”

The elusive nature of the blocking effect: 15 failures to replicate.

“…Rather than attempting to address this issue as a yes-or-no question, other researchers have started to focus on the conditions under which a social priming effect can be observed and the mechanisms that mediate its occurrence (e.g. Bargh, 2006;Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleeremans, 2012;Gomes & McCullough, 2015;Sharrif & Norenzayan, 2015), an avenue, we argue, that would be fruitful for the blocking effect as well.…”

Changing, priming, and acting on values: Effects via motivational relations in a circular model.

“…In both experiments, the behaviors were chosen on the assumption that they would affirm the primed constructs, which also happen to be values described in Schwartz's (1992) model. Yet, as noted by Bargh (2006), every promoted or primed motive may have both excitatory and inhibitory effects on diverse behaviors, and there is a need to understand which behaviors will be affected by each motive. For example, we know that priming money can decrease helpfulness (Vohs, Mead, & Goode, 2006).…”