Table Of ContentTHE AUTOMATICITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Advances in Social Cognition,
Volume X
This page intentionally left blank
THE AUTOMATICITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Advances in Social Cognition,
Volume X
Edited by
Jr.
ROBERT S. WYER,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Lead Article by
John A. Bargh
\}J ~~I~~~~~i?G~XP Press
NEW YORK AND LONDON
First Published 1997 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Published 2014 by Psychology Press
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Psychology Press
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA
Psychology Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
I I
Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling
Library of Congress Cataloging,in,Publication Data
The Automaticity of Everyday Life
Advances in Social Cognition, Volume X
ISBN 13: 978-0-805-81699-0 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-805-81700-3 (pbk)
Contents
Preface vii
1
The Automaticity of Everyday Life
John A. Bargh 1
2
Environments and Unconscious Processes
Mahzarin R. Banaji, Irene V Blair, and Jack Glaser 63
3
Consciousness, Free Choice, and Automaticity
Roy E. Baumeister and Kristin L. Sommer 75
4
Some Thoughts Extending Bargh's Argument
Leonard Berkowitz 83
5
Associations to Automaticity
Charles S. Carver 95
6
Minding Our Emotions:
On the Role of Automatic, Unconscious Affect
Gerald Clore and Timothy Ketelaar 105
7
Ifs and Thens in Cultural Psychology
Dov Cohen 121
8
Automaticity and Social Behavior:
A Model, a Marriage, and a Merger
Wendi L. Gardner and John T. Cacioppo 133
9
Rendering Accessible Information Relevant:
The Applicability of Everyday Life
Curtis D. Hardin and Alexander J. Rothman 143
V
vi Contents
10
The Automaticity of Academic Life:
Unconscious Applications of an Implicit Theory
Gordon D. Logan 157
11
Was the Cognitive Revolution Just a Detour
on the Road to Behaviorism? On the Need
to Reconcile Situational Control and Personal Control
Walter Mischel 181
12
Preconscious Automaticity
in a Modular Connectionist System
Eliot R. Smith 187
13
The Vicissitudes of Social Behavior and Mental Life
Thomas K. Srull 203
14
Automatic but Conscious:
That is How We Act Most of the Time
Joseph Tzelgov 217
15
Reply to the Commentaries
John A. Bargh 231
Author Index 247
Subject Index 255
Preface
This is the tenth volume of the Advances in Social Cognition series. From its
inception, the purpose of the series has been to present and evaluate new
theoretical advances in all areas of social cognition and information processing.
An entire volume is devoted to each theory, allowing the theory to be evaluated
from a variety of perspectives and permitting its implications for a wide range of
issues to be examined.
The series reflects two major characteristics of social cognition: the high level
of activity in the field and the interstitial nature of the work. Each volume
contains a target chapter that is timely in its application, novel in its approach,
and precise in its explication. The target chapter is then followed by a set of
companion chapters that examine the theoretical and empirical issues that the
target chapter has raised. These latter chapters are written by authors with
diverse theoretical orientations, representing different disciplines within psy
chology and, in some cases, entirely different disciplines. Target authors are then
given the opportunity to respond to the comments and criticisms of their work,
and to examine the ideas conveyed in the companion chapters in light of their
own. The dialogue created by this format is both unusual and, we believe,
extremely beneficial to the field.
Theory and research in the area of social cognition has traditionally focused
almost exclusively on intentional, goal-directed information processing. In con
trast, much of the cognitive activity that underlies judgments and behavioral
decisions is likely to occur automatically, and often without awareness. Although
this possibility has sometimes been acknowledged by social cognition researchers,
the specific nature of the cognitive activity involved, and the way it influences
overt behavior, have seldom been specified in detail.
For this reason, the work of John Bargh is of particular importance. Bargh's
conceptual and empirical contributions to an understanding of automaticity, which
span two decades, have long been recognized. In the present volume, he develops
a general theoretical formulation of automatic information processing that concep
tually integrates the extensive research he has done, and discusses the implications
of the theory for comprehension, attitudinal judgments, and overt behavior. The
result is an exceptionally provocative contribution to theory and research in social
information processing that is likely to have a profound influence on our general
understanding of social phenomena.
vii
viii Preface
The potential importance of Bargh's chapter is matched by that of the compan
ion articles. These articles, written by prominent researchers whose interests range
from cognitive science to cross-cultural psychology, not only help to refine and
extend Bargh's conceptualization but make important contributions in their own
right. The issues they explore include: the interactive influence of individual and
environmental factors on behavior; the interplay of conscious and nonconsious
processes; determinants of affect, emotion and aggression; biological and cultural
influences on automatic processes; accuracy in perceiving the sources of influence;
memory and resource allocation theories of judgment and performance; and the
implications of connectionist models for automaticity. As a result, the volume as a
whole makes a valuable contribution to research and theory not only in social
cognition, but in many other areas as well.
In addition to the authors themselves, we want to acknowledge the invaluable
assistance of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Their continued support and encour
agement of the Advances in Social Cognition series, and their commitment to the
publication of a high quality set of volumes, is deeply gratifying. It is a genuine
pleasure to work with them.
— Robert S. Wyer, Jr.
Chapter 7
The Automaticity of Everyday Life
John A. Bargh
New York University
MANIFESTO
If we are to use the methods of science in the field of human affairs, we must assume
that behavior is lawful and determined. We must expect to discover that what a man
does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been
discovered, we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions. This
possibility is offensive to many people. It is opposed to a tradition of long standing
which regards man as a free agent, whose behavior is the product, not of specifiable
antecedent conditions, but of spontaneous inner changes of course.... If we cannot
show what is responsible for a man's behavior, we say that he himself is responsible for
it. The precursors of physical science once followed the same practice, but the wind
is no longer blown by Aeolus, nor is the rain cast down by Jupiter Pluvius.
(Skinner, 1953, pp. 6-7, 283)
As Skinner argued so pointedly, the more we know about the situational causes
of psychological phenomena, the less need we have for postulating internal con
scious mediating processes to explain those phenomena. Now, as the purview of
social psychology is precisely to discover those situational causes of thinking, feeling,
and acting in the real or implied presence of other people (e.g., Ross & Nisbett,
1991), it is hard to escape the forecast that as knowledge progresses regarding
psychological phenomena, there will be less of a role played by free will or conscious
choice in accounting for them. In other words, because of social psychology's natural
focus on the situational determinants of thinking, feeling, and doing, it is inevitable
that social psychological phenomena will be found to be automatic in nature. That
trend has already begun (see Bargh, 1994; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), and it can
do nothing but continue.
1
