266 Social Cognition
to be called automaticorimplicitsocial cognition and have
been the subject of a massive amount of recent research.
The contrast between conscious, effortful, controlled men-
tal processes on one hand and unconscious, automatic ones on
the other became a prominent issue in cognitive psychology
largely due to influential papers by Posner and Snyder (1974),
Shiffrin and Schneider (1977), and Hasher and Zacks (1979),
yet there is quite a history of interest in the extent to which the
mind might be operating in ways unknown to the conscious
self. For example, researchers interested in human perfor-
mance have long been interested in the processes involved in
skill acquisition, whereby an initially novel task that requires
considerable effort and attention becomes relatively auto-
matic with practice (e.g., Fitts & Posner, 1967). After they be-
come automated, skills can be triggered and used without
much involvement of the conscious mind. In a different vein,
psychoanalytically oriented researchers have been interested
in how unconscious motivations might shape processes of
perception and cognition (e.g., Erdelyi, 1974). Cognitive re-
search of this sort addresses profound questions concerning
who is running the show. Does the conscious self call the
shots, or is the brain going about its business without much in-
terference from the conscious thinker? In this section, we first
review research on automatic aspects of social cognition, and
then we consider the case that can be made for the capacity of
the conscious mind to control and regulate processes of social
cognition. Finally, we consider some of the ways in which au-
tomatic and effortful processes can interact to determine
jointly the course of perception, thought, and action.
Automatic Social Cognition
The foundations for social-psychological treatments of the
issue of automaticity have been established in the work of
Bargh (e.g., 1982; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Bargh &
Ferguson, 2000). Synthesizing the insights emerging from
disparate research areas touching on the issue of automatic-
ity, Bargh (1994) argued that the notion of automatic mental
processes is complex and multifaceted. He argued that the
term has been used to refer to four distinct qualities of infor-
mation processing: awareness, intention, efficiency,andcon-
trol.That is, a process tends to be considered automatic if it
(a) occurs without the person’s awareness, (b) occurs without
the person’s intention, (c) occurs with great efficiency and
does not require much mental capacity, or (d) occurs in a
manner that is difficult to prevent or stop. Not all four criteria
are necessary for a process to be considered automatic. When
one or more of these characteristics is present, the relevant
process is often deemed to be relatively automatic.
A particularly compelling and influential demonstration of
the implicit operation of the mind was provided by Warrington
and Weiskrantz (1968). Their research documented that indi-
viduals suffering from anterograde amnesia, who are unable
to consciously recollect their recent experiences, nevertheless
showed a clear benefit from that experience in the perfor-
mance of indirect tests of memory, such as completing word
fragments. Although these patients have no explicit memory
for the words they saw during a study period, they neverthe-
less were better able to complete word fragments when the
corresponding word had indeed been previously studied. This
research clearly indicates that memories can be quite influen-
tial even when there is no conscious awareness of the relevant
prior episodes.
Social cognition researchers have sought to investigate the
role of awareness in social cognition in several ways. One
approach has simply been to demonstrate that individuals
are often unable to articulate accurately the factors that are im-
portant in shaping their behavioral choices (e.g., Nisbett &
Wilson, 1977). This fact obviously implies that people are
generally unaware of the processes at work behind the scenes
in the preconscious mind. Another approach to documenting
that some processes occur without awareness has been
adopted in research on priming. The basic idea of priming
research is quite straightforward. Individuals are exposed to
a task or environmental context that is designed to activate a
particular mental representation. Then a second, ostensibly
unrelated task is performed, and the researcher seeks to deter-
mine whether the previously activated representation exerts
any influence on information processing in the second task.
Research of this sort conclusively demonstrates that concepts
that have been activated in one context can continue to influ-
ence social cognition in subsequent, unrelated contexts, by
virtue of their enhanced accessibility (Higgins, 1996). A com-
mon effect of such priming is that subsequently encountered
information is assimilated toward the activated concept. For
example, Srull and Wyer (1979) showed that activating hostile
concepts in a language-processing task caused participants to
form more negative impressions of an ambiguous social target
in a subsequent impression formation task, compared to par-
ticipants who never had the hostile concepts activated in the
initial task. It is typically assumed that this assimilation
process occurs because the fortuitously activated concepts are
used to disambiguate later information, and the perceiver is
presumed to be oblivious to the fact that it is occurring.
Perhaps the best evidence that priming effects occur with-
out the perceiver’s awareness comes from research that
employs subliminal priming techniques. In this research,
concepts are activated by exposing participants to extremely