Biomedical subjects

John A Bargh

Publications and source records attributed to John A Bargh.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

How social perception can automatically influence behavior.

Do we always know the reasons for our actions? Or is our behavior sometimes unknowingly and unintentionally influenced by what we have recently perceived? It has been traditionally assumed that the automatic influence of knowledge in memory is limited to people's interpretation of the world, and stops short of shaping their actual behavior. Researchers in experimental social psychology have begun to challenge this assumption by documenting how people's behaviors can be unknowingly influenced by knowledge that is incidentally activated in memory during social perception. We review findings that suggest that the social knowledge that is incidentally activated while reading words or imagining events subsequently affects participants' behaviors across a range of ostensibly unrelated domains.

Association Learning↗

PubMed2004

The projection of implicit and explicit goals.

In 3 studies, the authors analyzed whether projection occurs for both conscious and nonconscious goals. In Experiment 1, participants who were predisposed to hold a learning goal over a performance goal rated others as possessing more of a learning goal. In Experiment 2, participants who were either implicitly primed with or explicitly assigned to have the goal to compete perceived others as striving for competitive goals more than control participants. In Experiment 3, the authors demonstrated that it was the actual goal to compete rather than the trait construct of competitiveness that was projected. The control of automatic goal projection effects is discussed, and interpersonal consequences of goal projection are delineated.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

The internet and social life.

The Internet is the latest in a series of technological breakthroughs in interpersonal communication, following the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. It combines innovative features of its predecessors, such as bridging great distances and reaching a mass audience. However, the Internet has novel features as well, most critically the relative anonymity afforded to users and the provision of group venues in which to meet others with similar interests and values. We place the Internet in its historical context, and then examine the effects of Internet use on the user's psychological well-being, the formation and maintenance of personal relationships, group memberships and social identity, the workplace, and community involvement. The evidence suggests that while these effects are largely dependent on the particular goals that users bring to the interaction-such as self-expression, affiliation, or competition-they also interact in important ways with the unique qualities of the Internet communication situation.

Communication↗

PubMed2003

Thinking of you: nonconscious pursuit of interpersonal goals associated with relationship partners.

The mere psychological presence of relationship partners was hypothesized to trigger interpersonal goals that are then pursued nonconsciously. Qualitative data suggested that people tend to pursue different interpersonal goals within different types of relationships (e.g., mother, best friend, coworker). In several studies, priming participants' relationship representations produced goal-directed behavior (achievement, helping, understanding) in line with the previously assessed goal content of those representations. These findings support the hypothesis that interpersonal goals are component features of relationship representations and that mere activation of those representations, even in the partner's physical absence, causes the goals to become active and to guide behavior nonconsciously within the current situation.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2002

The automatic evaluation of novel stimuli.

From classic theory and research in psychology, we distill a broad theoretical statement that evaluative responding can be immediate, unintentional, implicit, stimulus based, and linked directly to approach and avoidance motives. This statement suggests that evaluative responses should be elicited by novel, nonrepresentational stimuli (e.g., abstract art, "foreign" words). We tested this hypothesis through combining the best features of relevant automatic-affect research paradigms. We first obtained explicit evaluative ratings of novel stimuli. From these, we selected normatively positive and negative stimuli to use as primes in a sequential priming paradigm. Two experiments using this paradigm demonstrated that briefly presented novel prime stimuli were evaluated automatically, as they facilitated responses to subsequently presented target stimuli of the same valence just as much as did pictures or names of real objects. A final experiment revealed that exposure to novel stimuli produces muscular predispositions to approach or avoid them.

Acoustic Stimulation↗