Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?

The perspective that behavior is often driven by unconscious determinants has become widespread in social psychology. Bargh, Chen, and Burrows' (1996) famous study, in which participants unwittingly exposed to the stereotype of age walked slower when exiting the laboratory, was instrumental in defining this perspective. Here, we present two experiments aimed at replicating the original study. Despite the use of automated timing methods and a larger sample, our first experiment failed to show priming. Our second experiment was aimed at manipulating the beliefs of the experimenters: Half were led to think that participants would walk slower when primed congruently, and the other half was led to expect the opposite. Strikingly, we obtained a walking speed effect, but only when experimenters believed participants would indeed walk slower. This suggests that both priming and experimenters' expectations are instrumental in explaining the walking speed effect. Further, debriefing was suggestive of awareness of the primes. We conclude that unconscious behavioral priming is real, while real, involves mechanisms different from those typically assumed to cause the effect

No Effect of Weight on Judgments of Importance in the Moral Domain and Evidence of Publication Bias from a Meta-Analysis

In different cultures, people use the concept of weight to refer to important matters. Recent studies in grounded cognition suggested that experiences of weight affect unrelated judgments of importance in metaphor-congruent ways. Theories in grounded cognition and prime-to-behavior effects state that sensations of weight activate concepts of importance, which may affect morality-related variables that are influenced by judgments of importance. The present research aimed to test the effect of carrying a heavy (or light) clipboard on the perceived importance of helping and on the judged severity of moral transgressions. After finding no significant effects in two experiments, a third study explored whether these results were due to a specific lack of effect of weight on morality-related variables or to the concept of importance not being grounded in sensations of weight in Brazilian samples. Specifically, in Study 3 we attempted to replicate two seminal studies but found no significant effects. Together with evidence of publication bias in a meta-analysis of published studies, the current results suggest that the concept of importance may not be as universally grounded in sensations of weight as previously assumed. We discuss the implications of these results for grounded cognition theories and methodological and statistical aspects of priming studies

Implicit attitudes : Quantitative semantic misattribution procedure

Certain mental processes are suggested to exist beyond conscious awareness and control. These processes have often been categorized as implicit, in contrast to explicit, processes, which are readily available to conscious report. Researchers have attempted to measure and assess these implicit processes in a different number of ways. Projective measures, for instance, present ambiguous or unstructured stimuli to respondents, with the assumption that their responses will reveal aspects about their attitudes, personality, and etc. Despite longstanding evidence disfavoring most projective measures, their use in clinical and forensic settings has been remarkably robust. Phrased in terms of modern psychological research, projection might be considered an instance of misattribution, that is, mistaking the source for the effect. People, for example, might misinterpret the transient pleasure of a sunny day as lasting life satisfaction. Such source of confusion is a common feature of events in everyday life; correction to this misattribution demands motivation, awareness, and control of the bias responsible for the misattribution. This complexity makes projective measures hard to design. In the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP, Payne et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 277-293, 2005), for example, participants are briefly presented with an ambiguous pictograph (e.g., a Chinese character) preceded by a prime (e.g., photos of Black or White people). Participants are then asked to rate the pleasantness of the pictograph-the assumption in this paradigm is that evaluations of how pleasant the pictograph is perceived to be, are influenced by the individual’s automatic affective reactions that s/he has towards the prime. Despite the fact that the AMP is easily administered, shows good internal consistency, and has demonstrated reliable effects both between groups and in individual score differences; prime-congruent semantic concepts may be activated in working memory and, rather than affective reactions, the valence of these semantic concepts guide the evaluations of the target, that is, the pictograph (Blaison et al., Emotion, 12, 403-412, 2012). Even if this semantic route is not the primary mediator, semantic processing is likely to be involved in evaluative responses, or at least, influence the processes leading to them (Storbeck and Clore, Cognition & Emotion, 21, 1212-1237, 2007). Here, we studied misattributions using the AMP by examining freely generated words, which were quantified using natural language processing to investigate whether the semantic content was influenced by the manipulations. We labeled this method Quantitative Semantic Misattribution Procedure (QSMP). More specifically, in the present study we measured implicit attitudes caused by Black and White faces (i.e., primes) on the semantic content of explicit verbal responses to Chinese characters. Since verbal responding relies on both highly automated implicit processes and consciously reportable explicit execution, quantitative semantics allows for studying both implicit and explicit processes. We showed that the semantic representation of participants’ verbal responses was significantly different for black and white primes in the un-warned but not the warned group and that the semantically expressed valence was equal for black and white face primes, whereas black target faces had higher semantic valence than white. Clearly, the QSMP can be used to study evaluative and non-evaluative influence of racial attitudes

Bounded Effort Automaticity: A Drama in Four Parts

This chapter proposes a new theoretical perspective on the self-regulation of effort. In the first part, we discuss research on motivational intensity and cardiovascular adjustments. The sympathetic impact on the heart via beta-adrenergic receptors is proportional to task engagement. This beta-adrenergic impact becomes especially evident in shortened cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP). PEP thus serves as a “gold standard” measure of effort mobilization. Most research on effort mobilization has supported some form of resource conservation principle, or the notion that people prefer to minimize effort to attain their goals. This research has especially supported the predictions of motivational intensity theory that posits that people mobilize effort proportionally to task demand as long as success is possible and justified. However, research from the automaticity literature suggests that people can also be directly primed to mobilize their effort, and that such priming also influences PEP. This raises the question if automatic priming processes operate independently of the resource conservation principle. To resolve this problem, we propose a bounded effort automaticity approach, which integrates automaticity research with the resource conservation principle. In this approach, priming action and inaction during task performance automatically leads to effort mobilization, but only as long as success is possible and justified. In support of our approach, we discuss studies showing that automatic priming increases mobilized effort but only as long as success is possible and justified. These findings confirm that effort mobilization can be influenced automatically, but only within boundary conditions