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J A Bargh

Publications and source records attributed to J A Bargh.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

The generality of the automatic attitude activation effect.

Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986) demonstrated that Ss were able to evaluate adjectives more quickly when these adjectives were immediately preceded (primed) by attitude objects of similar valence, compared with when these adjectives were primed by attitude objects of opposite valence. Moreover, this effect obtained primarily for attitude objects toward which Ss were presumed to hold highly accessible attitudes, as indexed by evaluation latency. The present research explored the generality of these findings across attitude objects and across procedural variations. The results of 3 experiments indicated that the automatic activation effect is a pervasive and relatively unconditional phenomenon. It appears that most evaluations stored in memory, for social and nonsocial objects alike, become active automatically on the mere presence or mention of the object in the environment.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Future-event schemas and certainty about the future: automaticity in depressives' future-event predictions.

The proposition was tested that depressives make predictions about the future based on a pessimistic future-event schema. Participants varying in depression predicted whether positive and negative events would happen to them (or to an average person) in the future by pressing yes or no at a computer terminal as quickly as possible, either under a concurrent attentional load or under no such load. As hypothesized, depressives predicted more negative events and fewer positive events than did mild depressives or nondepressives and showed greater automaticity in their predictions. That is, the attentional load did not increase depressives' response latencies for either negative or positive events, even though it did so reliably for both mildly depressed and nondepressed individuals. Depressives may thus possess a highly developed future-event schema that operates efficiently in enabling future-event predictions.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

The ecology of automaticity: toward establishing the conditions needed to produce automatic processing effects.

In the past 15 years, the single term automatic has been applied to a diversity of laboratory phenomena that differ as to the preconditions necessary for their occurrence. Several major strains of automaticity are distinguished, based on the experimental conditions under which they are obtained: preconscious automatic processes, requiring only the proximal stimulus event; postconscious automatic processes, similar to preconscious effects but needing a recent activation or "priming" event for their operation; and goal-dependent automatic processes, which occur only when a specific, intentional processing goal is in place. It is argued that to more accurately specify the conditions under which an automatic effect will occur in the natural environment, greater attention needs to be given to aspects of the experimental paradigm (e.g., subjects' task goal, questionnaire administrations, previous tasks) that might be necessary to produce the effect.

Association Learning↗
PubMed1988

Context-dependent automatic processing in depression: accessibility of negative constructs with regard to self but not others.

The existence of automatic negative self-referential thought in depression was examined by using the concurrent memory load paradigm. Depressed and nondepressed subjects judged each of a series of depressed- and nondepressed-content adjectives as to its descriptiveness of the self or of the average other person. While making each judgment, some subjects held six digits in working memory, whereas the remaining subjects had no concurrent memory load. We found that the memory load manipulation resulted in a reliably smaller increase in depressed subjects' self-referential judgment latencies for depressed content than for nondepressed content, with the reverse being true of nondepressed subjects. For all subjects, however, the load effect on other-referential judgment latencies was smaller for nondepressed-content adjectives than for depressed-content adjectives. The results suggest an automatic, unintentional component in the depressed person's use of negative social constructs in self-perception but not in other-perception, indicating a context-dependent form of automatic processing.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Automaticity of chronically accessible constructs in person x situation effects on person perception: it's just a matter of time.

Models of Person X Situation influences on social behavior and judgement have invoked two distinct mechanisms: a personality disposition and a situational press. In this study we conceptualized both influences in terms of a single underlying mechanism, construct accessibility. We pitted the characteristic ways that individuals perceive others against situational influences on accessibility (i.e., contextual priming) and tracked over time the relative power of these competing influences on the outcome of an impression-formation task. Subjects possessed either a chronically accessible (chronics) or an inaccessible (nonchronics) construct for either outgoing or inconsiderate behavior. As predicted, as the delay since the priming event lengthened (from 15 to 180 s), chronics were progressively more likely to use the chronically accessible construct instead of the primed alternative construct to categorize an ambiguous target behavior, whereas nonchronics' relative use of the primed and alternative constructs did not change as a function of postpriming delay.

Cues↗