The proposed research focuses on several preconscious mental processes that have been found in recent research to occur immediately - without conscious intent, awareness, or guidance - in reaction to social objects, events, and situations. Recent research by several laboratories has demonstrated a variety of such processes that are put into operation immediately by features of social situations, and then operate despite not being consciously (intentionally) chosen, and without needing to be consciously guided to completion. Broadly speaking these effects can be classified as (1) an ongoing automatic evaluation of the environment, (2) an automatic effect of perception on behavior, and (3) automatic goal pursuits in which goals become active in situations to guide behavior without an intervening act of will. There are substantial theoretical implications of these findings of basic, environmentally-driven determinants of evaluation, motivation, and behavior, especially as concerns the necessity and role of conscious deliberative processes in judgment, goal- setting and pursuit, and social interaction. There are also implications for mental health in that these nonconscious causes of emotion and behavior are relatively opaque to introspection; in the case of nonconscious motivation one s behavior is guided and directed towards a goal not intentionally chosen in that given situation; thus one may not be aware of the overall pattern and effect of one s behavior in that situation.
Our aim i s to uncover the downstream consequences of these immediate automatic processes for subjective states and for interpersonal behavior, and to focus more precisely on the precise mechanisms and mediating processes that produce the observed effects. Several of the proposed studies make use of priming manipulations in order to activate a given interpersonal goal (e.g., competition) or perceptual representation (e.g., a stereotype) without the participant s knowledge; in several experiments this priming is subliminal in nature. The effects of this contextual priming of the person s emotion, judgments, goal pursuit and self-regulation, and interpersonal behavior are then assessed, as is their degree of awareness of the contextual influence.
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