Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 121

One of the ways in which social behavior can be affected outside of conscious awareness is through a process called priming. Priming occurs when a concept or other knowledge structure is automatically triggered or activated by an environmental stimulus, thereby becoming more likely to affect subsequent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Förster & Liberman, 2007; Higgins, 1989; Welsh & Ordóñez, 2014). When you read the word gun, what other concepts or words come to mind? Perhaps bullet, violence, and soldier (see Figure 3.2 on page 90)? The activation of fire engine led to the activation of other concepts that are closely associated with it in your memory, a process called spreading activation (Collins & Loftus, 1975; Newell & Shanks, 2014; Sansom-Daly & Forgas, 2010). In Bargh’s scrambled sentence task described earlier, words related to elderly were consciously processed and activated, and this in turn triggered the nonconscious activation of the actual concept, elderly (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Bargh et al. (1996) similarly nonconsciously primed participants with neutral, rude, or polite words, and they subsequently acted consistently with that prime (see Figure 3.3 on page 90). In addition to concepts, other knowledge structures that can be automatically activated by stimuli in the environment include goals, motivations, and evaluations (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Tröschel, 2001; Hassin, Bargh, & Zimerman, 2009; Sansom-Daly & Forgas, 2010). For instance, nonconsciously activating the goal of impression formation can lead people to form more coherent impressions of a target person (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996) than control individuals do.

Recently, research on priming has come under intensive scrutiny after a number of failures to replicate what had been considered to be solid, reliable findings (Molden, 2014; Pashler, Coburn, & Harris, 2012; Pashler, Rohrer, & Harris, 2013). Concerns about the replicability of priming effects has led to a wider debate about what constitutes a true replication and to what extent we can expect highly context-sensitive effects to replicate across settings (Cesario, 2014). Currently the debate rages on, and it will be fascinating to watch in the coming years as researchers closely examine when and why nonconscious activation of concepts, feelings, and goals may occur.

X-system: Primarily reflexive, nonconscious, or automatic parallel processing system

C-system: Largely reflective, sequential, conscious, or deliberative mental processing system

Automaticity: Extent to which a given event is unintentional, occurs without conscious awareness, is accomplished efficiently, and once begun, cannot be controlled