Automatic social behaviour and the preparation to interact

Automatic social behaviour and the preparation to interact

Some might ask what the function is of storing knowledge about other people. The writers of this article suggest that stored knowledge about a social group (stereotype) can provide information of interacting effectively with group members and that automatic social behaviour that arises from the activation of a social category can be the result of perceivers preparing to interact with a member of the target category. In other words, when a social group category is activated, perceivers engage in a motivated preparation to interact with a group member. This may in turn lead to systematic and measurable automatic behaviour.

Many studies have shown that exposure to specific trait constructs, behaviours or social group members can result in the non-conscious expression of the activated social behaviours. One study showed that participants primed with the trait construct ‘rude’ interrupted an experimenter sooner than control participants. The writers of the current article propose that when a perceiver encounters a social group member, his/her motivational system begins to prepare for an interaction with the primed target. This should be the case for both actual interaction and perception through pictures and words. The outputs of this preparation depend on the characteristics of the target, on a person’s evaluation of the target and the context of the interaction. Some researchers have made a model out of this: the auto-motive model. This model proposes that when someone is exposed to a group member whose representation contains the goal to seek adventure (skydiver), he/she will adopt a more risk-taking motivational orientation. Other researchers have suggested a more nuanced and interactive account. They found that priming various interpersonal relationships led to the pursuit of one’s own goals associated with those relationship representations.

The direct expression accounts use the perception-behaviour link. This has been described as an unintentional, a-motivational mechanism whereby perception of environmental stimuli have a passive, direct effect on behaviour. first, automatic perception takes place. Then, a corresponding internal mental representation is activated and finally, once the behavioural representation is activated, it is more likely to be carried out than if it had not been. Many researchers agree that mental representations are activated without conscious awareness at the perception of a target. What is activated depends on the nature of the perceived stimuli. The writers do not complete agree with the direct account, because the process seems to be non-motivational. The other critical feature is the postulate that evaluations or attitudes toward a target group or individual do not influence automatic social behaviour. This means that everyone needs to know the cultural stereotypes involved, in order for the predicted effects to occur. In the current research, the writers distinguish between explicit and implicit attitude measures. According to the writers, the direct expression accounts can’t fully explain all situations that involve automatic behaviour preceded by the priming of social categories. A motivational component is needed to completely understand this type of behaviour.

The studies

The purpose of the three studies was to examine whether motivational factors were an additional determinant of automatic social behaviour.

Study 1

Participants completed this experiment individually in a room. In the room, a male confederate was filling out questionnaires at a table, with his back to the door when the participant entered. The room also contained two soundproof booths. In the first soundproof booth, the position of the confederate allowed him auditory and visual access to the participant. The first part of the experiment was a priming task and participants were randomly assigned to the straight prime, gay prime or no-prime control condition. After 130 trials of the first task, the computer supposedly crashed. A message on the screen appeared and it said that the program must be started over again and that the participant needed to fetch the experimenter. When the experimenter came to the room, he said that the participant had to start the program over. At this point, both the experimenter and the confederate began noting the participant’s reaction. The experimenter then touched a couple of keys on the keyboard and the program resumed. The experimenter told that everything was okay and that the participant could start with the second task. The second task was filling out questionnaires about attitudes toward gay men, a free-response measure eliciting the stereotype content of gay men and questions about the participants’ sexual orientation.

The results showed that participants in the gay prime condition had higher hostility ratings than participants in the control prime and the straight prime condition. The scores on the rating-scale on the attitude toward gay men did not show a relation with hostility ratings. Also, no participants listed any hostility-related word as part of the gay men stereotype. Many participants listed weak and/or effeminate as words in the free-response descriptions. This replicated research demonstrating that gay men are perceived as relatively passive or effeminate. This study shows that priming social categories can lead to behaviours opposite of those traits associated with the stereotype. So, automatic behaviour does not only result from direct expression of activated stereotypic traits, but also from a preparation to interact with a member of a primed social group. If automatic behaviours only resulted from the activation of stereotypic traits, then participants primed with gay men should have behaved with less hostility than other participants. Preparing to interact with a negative outgroup member (the gay group is seen as a negative outgroup) would produce greater rejection-related hostility for the gay male primes.

Study 2

With this study, the writers wanted to test the role of attitudes (measured implicitly) as a motivational underpinning in automatic behaviours. Positive versus negative implicit attitudes toward a social category imply opposite behavioural intentions toward a category member. So, if the researchers prime the elderly social category, positive toward the elderly should lead to decreased walking speed (somebody slows down to interact effectively with elderly people) and negativity toward the elderly should lead to increased walking speed (somebody speeds up to avoid interacting with the stereotypically slow outgroup members). The opposite pattern should arise from priming the youth social category. The writers first measured participants’ implicit negativity and positivity toward elderly and youth. A couple of weeks later, they primed participants with either youth or elderly category and then measured the amount of time it took them to exit the experiment room. With this second study the writers also wanted to test the hypothesis that an implicit measure of attitudes will relate to automatic behaviours, even though an explicit measure does not. During the first session, in which the attitudes toward youths and elderly were measured, the writers also provided two explicit measures of attitudes toward the elderly.

The results showed that participants primed with elderly pictures took more time walking to the exit than those primed with youth pictures. The writers’ model predicted that, within the elderly prime condition, the implicit elderly attitude measure predicted exit walking time. Higher positivity toward elderly went together with participants exiting more slowly. As negativity increased, participants exited more quickly. Direct expression accounts predict no effect of attitudes on exit walking time. The results also showed that, in the youth prime condition, when positivity increased, exiting time also increased (and the opposite was true for negativity). So it seems that implicit attitude measures significantly predicted automatic behaviour following priming of certain categories. Direct expression accounts alone could not have predicted these effects.

Study 3

This study was conducted to provide more direct evidence that the priming of social categories induces motivated behaviour. The writers tried to accomplish this by examining whether social category priming would yield a phenomenon that is characteristic of motivated cognition. Research has shown that providing participants with the opportunity to interact (even symbolically) with a primed target should lead to a decrease in the accessibility of the category and related concepts. Other studies have found that providing people the opportunity to interact with the target would serve as an additional prime of the target’s social category and thus produce an increase in the accessibility of the category and concepts. The current study tested this. Participants were either primed with the category elderly or given a control-prime (so, no prime). Participants then either completed an irrelevant delay task or completed a task that would complete the goal of interacting with a category member (writing about what it would be like to interact with an elderly man). This writing task could symbolically fulfil the activated goal and eliminate the action-tendency of the goal. Afterwards, all participants completed a lexical-decision task to measure the accessibility of the category elderly.

The motivational account predicts that priming elderly activates a goal to interact with elderly. Writing about interacting with an old person represents fulfilment of that goal and this leads to inhibition/reduction of the category accessibility. Direct expression models, should predict that the combination of conditions would result in the highest level of accessibility of elderly. The results showed that after social category activation and subsequent satisfaction of the goal, accessibility decreased. So, the accessibility of the primed social category followed a course that is characteristic of motivated processing. All three studies have indicated that there are possible motivational factors in automatic social behaviour.