The automated will: nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals.

By John A. Bargh, Peter M. Gollwitzer, Annette Y. Lee-Chai, Kimberly Barndollar, Roman Trötschel. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001

1,924 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is proposed that goals can be activated outside of awareness and then operate nonconsciously to guide self-regulation effectively (J. A. Bargh, 1990). Five experiments are reported in which the goal either to perform well or to cooperate was activated, without the awareness of participants, through a priming manipulation. In Experiment 1 priming of the goal to perform well caused participants to perform comparatively better on an intellectual task. In Experiment 2 priming of the goal to cooperate caused participants to replenish a commonly held resource more readily. Experiment 3 used a dissociation paradigm to rule out perceptual-construal alternative explanations. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that action guided by nonconsciously activated goals manifests two classic content-free features of the pursuit of consciously held goals. Nonconsciously activated goals effectively guide action, enabling adaptation to ongoing situational demands.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e02609e18af53e38c791a2f32135466e167752f

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Citations in the corpus

Unraveling Priming: When Does the Same Prime Activate a Goal versus a Trait? (2009, methodology): “Given that conscious and nonconscious goals are believed to be largely indistinguishable in terms of their basic mechanism (Bargh et al. 2001; Chartrand and Bargh 1996), nonconscious goal activation should follow a similar dynamic trajectory.”
Automatic emotion regulation during anger provocation (2007, methodology): “…that complex judgments, social behaviors, and even the pursuit of higher-level goals (e.g., to cooperate with another person in a competitive game) can be executed automatically (e.g., Bargh et al., 2001; Bodenhausen, Macrae, & Hugenberg, 2003; Kihlstrom, 1987; Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2005).”
An Integrated Model of Goal‐Focused Coaching (2012, background): “As such the goal construct has been variously defined in terms of cognitions (Locke, 2000), behaviour (Bargh et al., 2001; Warshaw & Davis, 1985) and affect (Pervin, 1982) (for further discussion on these points see Street, 2002).”
Nonconscious influences of religion on prosociality: A priming study (2007, methodology): “This task has already been used successfully to prime concepts without participants being aware of any particular concept having been activated ( Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Trotschel, 2001 ).”
The Interplay Between Goal Intentions and Implementation Intentions (2005, methodology): “As Bargh et al. (2001) demonstrated, goals need not be consciously held to lead to effective goal pursuit.”
How do habits guide behavior? Perceived and actual triggers of habits in daily life (2012, methodology): “Loudness goal activation was further assessed through participants' reactions to goal-inconsistent feedback indicating that they were perceived (from their recorded introduction) as shy and reserved (see Bargh et al., 2001).”
The Unconscious Consumer: Effects of Environment on Consumer Behavior (2005, positive): “Bargh et al. (2001) extended this research using more social goals.”
In search of the nonconscious sources of goal pursuit: Accessibility and positive affective valence of the goal state (2007, methodology): “Following previous work (Aarts et al., 2004; Bargh et al., 2001; Custers & Aarts, 2005) participants completed an awareness check on the computer after the mouse-click task.”
A Review of Attributional Retraining Treatments: Fostering Engagement and Persistence in Vulnerable College Students (2009, background): “The timing of the causal search activation component is important as it “primes” students to be active recipients of the information provided in the next two stages (Bargh, 2006; Bargh et al., 2001).”
Mindfulness as a moderator of the effect of implicit motivational self-concept on day-to-day behavioral motivation (2007, methodology): “Thus, while the activation of nonconscious motivations may be adaptive and lead to positive behavioral outcomes (e.g., Bargh et al. 2001), there are circumstances in which consciousness appears to play a valuable role in guiding behavior, including the modification or moderation of automatic…”