Over the last 2 decades, researchers have demonstrated that people's attitudes toward objects are automatically activated upon perception of those objects (e.g., Bargh, 1989; Bargh, Chaiken, Governder, & Pratto , 1992; Fazio. Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986). The automatic nature of such attitudes means that they are activated without people's awareness. control, intention, or effort, and. like other automatic responses, are largely assumed to be rigid, impervious to change, slow to develop, and yet impactful on behavior (e.g., Bargh, 1989, 1999; McConnell & Leibold, 2001; Wilson, Lindsey & Schooler, 2000). In contrast to the prevailing notion of automatic attitudes as rigid responses, the current proposal tests the potential sensitivity of automatic attitudes from a motivational perspective. In particular, it is possible to conceptualize automatic attitudes as denotations of initial emotional experiences (see LeDoux, 1996). Given how emotions have been characterized as indicative of and sensitive to the perceiver's motivational state, automatic attitudes might similarly represent the meaningfulness of the respective objects according to the perceiver's current goals. That is, an automatic attitude toward an object might represent the degree to which that object facilitates or impedes the perceiver's currently active goals, according to both chronic and temporary goal knowledge. In this way, a motivational perspective on automatic attitudes predicts greater sensitivity and fluctuation than the existing predominant view of such attitudes. The proposed experiments will test the dependence of automatic attitudes on the goal-relevance of the respective objects as a function of the nature of the goal knowledge concerning the objects, The proposed experiments will test whether chronic as well as recently acquired knowledge about the goal-relevance of objects determines the automatic attitudes toward those objects. Not only does this view generate numerous hypotheses concerning the dynamic sensitivity of automatic attitudes, it reconnects the construct of such attitudes with earlier work on valences (Lewin, 1935) and motivationally-bound perception (e.g., Erdelyi, 1974).
| Ferguson, Melissa J (2008) On becoming ready to pursue a goal you don't know you have: effects of nonconscious goals on evaluative readiness. J Pers Soc Psychol 95:1268-94 |
| Ferguson, Melissa J (2007) On the automatic evaluation of end-states. J Pers Soc Psychol 92:596-611 |
| Ferguson, Melissa J; Bargh, John A (2004) Liking is for doing: the effects of goal pursuit on automatic evaluation. J Pers Soc Psychol 87:557-72 |
