The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals

The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals Bargh Lee-Chai Barndollar Gollwitzer Trötschel

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The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals 2001 Journal of personality and social psychology Bargh2001-the-automated-will-nonconscious-activation-a Bargh2001-the-automated-will-nonconscious-activation-a.txt, the project's staged copy 2b234e709181b829ec2bd41fa7748ab37e0ac632 not-redistributable social-psychology

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0 spans located by searching the stored text for the quote's exact words, allowing any whitespace between them existence Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. nonconscious goal pursuit Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. behavioural-experiment behavioural-experiment Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms Repeated, consistent pursuit of a goal in a given situation forms an automatic situation-to-goal association, so situational cues alone later activate the goal without conscious choice. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms An activated but unfulfilled goal-directed action tendency accumulates strength over time (unlike perceptual activation, which decays), which is why the behavioural priming effect grows with delay. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The intention-behaviour correlations rest on small per-cell samples. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Retrospective self-report is a weak index of what participants were actually aware of during the task. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The intention questionnaire may not have been sensitive enough to detect real differences in cooperation motivation. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Experiment 3 used a DISSOCIATION PARADIGM specifically to test the perceptual-construal account eliminates: that the prime changed how the situation was PERCEIVED rather than activating a goal - the leading alternative explanation for behavioural priming · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. a control group was subliminally exposed to words UNRELATED to impression formation eliminates: that the effect comes from subliminal exposure as such rather than from the content of the primed words · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. extensive questioning during debriefing looked for any sign that participants were aware of the priming manipulation's effect eliminates: that the effect is conscious compliance rather than nonconscious activation · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. goal pursuit goal pursuit Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. content-free features content-free features Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. persistence persistence Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. resumption resumption Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. perceptual construal perceptual construal Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. goal-directed action tendencies goal-directed action tendencies Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. nonconscious goal pursuit - the claim in one sentence, and note how much is packed into it: goals can be ACTIVATED OUTSIDE OF AWARENESS, then OPERATE nonconsciously, and do so EFFECTIVELY - guiding self-regulation rather than merely biasing a judgement. Three separate assertions (activation without awareness, autonomous operation, functional success), any of which could fail while the others held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. goal versus construct - THE DISAMBIGUATION THIS CORPUS NEEDS AND RARELY GETS. A prime made of `win, compete, succeed, strive` could have activated a construct that changes how the situation is CONSTRUED, or a goal that DRIVES behaviour. The paper separates them by time course and states the falsifier first: NO model of construal effects predicts an increase over time, so the same prime is required to produce a decreasing perceptual effect and an increasing behavioural one. A crossover, not a difference in size Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. DEFINITION BY DIAGNOSTIC SIGNATURE - goal pursuit is identified by CONTENT-FREE features (vigour, persistence against obstacles, resumption after disruption) taken from the study of consciously held goals. Because the criteria are content-free they can be applied to a goal the participant cannot report, which is the only reason the nonconscious version is testable at all. The definition is doing methodological work, not just fixing a meaning Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the control is built into the definition: participants are given ONE AND THE SAME TASK with the goal activated for some and not others, so that `we were able to hold the content of the task goal constant across all participants` and let the content-free features be the only thing that varies. Borrowing a content-free definition and then holding content constant is the same decision made twice, at the level of theory and of design Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. replicates → Ovsiankina (1928) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → J. A. Bargh, 1990 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Atkinson and Birch (1970) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. goal pursuit —operationalised-as→ content-free features goal pursuit content-free features strength of the relation: 0.95 · note: The definitional move the whole paper rests on. Confidence 0.95: the sentence is a characterisation of goal pursuit, cited to Lewin, Heckhausen and Wicklund & Gollwitzer, not an inference of mine. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but goal pursuit is 'CHARACTERIZED BY' content-free features; operationalised-as is loose. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. persistence —part-of→ content-free features persistence content-free features strength of the relation: 0.95 · note: Listed as one of the three, in the sentence that names the category. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. resumption —part-of→ content-free features resumption content-free features strength of the relation: 0.95 · note: The second of the three tested directly - Experiment 5, resumption after a lengthy disruption with a more attractive alternative available. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. goal-directed action tendencies —distinct-from→ perceptual construal goal-directed action tendencies perceptual construal differs in: WHAT DELAY DOES TO THEM - construal effects DECREASE over time, goal-directed action tendencies INCREASE. A crossover on the same manipulation, and the increase is the half no accessibility or construal model predicts, which is what makes it a falsifier rather than a comparison · strength of the relation: 0.95 · note: THE SHARPEST ROW ON THIS RECORD. Two kinds of priming effect told apart by their TIME COURSE - the second record tonight where identity turns on latency rather than on magnitude (see Chen2018). The prediction is stated before the experiment and names the result that would refute it. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. ANOVA ANOVA Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. p-value p-value Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. interaction effect interaction effect Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. t-test t-test Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Cronbach's alpha Cronbach's alpha Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. correlation correlation Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. standardization (z scores) standardization (z scores) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mean mean Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Participants primed with high-performance words found more words on unrelated word-search puzzles than participants primed with neutral words. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Priming the goal of cooperation increased the number of fish returned to the common pool, as did an explicit conscious cooperation goal. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The goal-priming effect did not depend on a concurrent conscious goal in the same direction, ruling out the 'piggybacking' account. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. A five-minute delay after the identical prime weakened the impression-formation (perceptual) effect but strengthened the task-performance (motivational) effect, a crossover dissociation. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Performance-goal primed participants were far more likely than neutral-primed participants to keep working after an explicit instruction to stop, showing persistence against an obstacle. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. After an interruption, a far larger share of performance-goal primed participants (66% against 32%) chose to resume the interrupted Scrabble task. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The self-reported intentions of participants with a nonconscious cooperation goal were unrelated to their actual cooperation, although priming did change their behaviour. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. automatic goal pursuit automatic goal pursuit Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. content-free features content-free features Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. continuing on the task continuing on the task Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. priming condition priming condition Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. number of words number of words Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. postpriming delay postpriming delay Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. participant gender participant gender Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. choice of task choice of task Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. conscious goal conscious goal Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. number of fish returned number of fish returned Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 26.0 vs. 21.5 — mean number of hidden words found by performance-primed versus neutral-primed participants in Experiment 1 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 57% / 22% — proportion of participants who kept working after the stop signal, performance-primed versus neutral-primed (Experiment 4) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 66% / 32% — proportion who resumed the interrupted Scrabble task rather than switching to the cartoon task, primed versus unprimed (Experiment 5) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. F (1, 74) = 9.64, p = .003 — the reliable main effect of the performance prime on number of words found in Experiment 1 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 78 — number of participants in Experiment 1 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 288 — number of participants in the four-factor dissociation study, Experiment 3 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. r = −.11 — the (small, negative) correlation between self-reported intention to cooperate and actual cooperation among participants without a conscious cooperation goal Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution.

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