The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals - Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai et. al. (2001) - Article

Theories that look at goal pursuit usually look at conscious choices that guide behaviour. But psychology also looks at non-conscious processes, as it seems to be an important factor for human behaviour. Many studies look at memory, attention, judgment, social perception and emotional appraisal and it seems to be that non-conscious determinants are no exceptions. In this article, the writers look at the non-conscious activation of goals. The writers think that goals can be triggered outside of awareness and get completed. There is no conscious intervention needed for this. This is because non-consciously activated goals will cause the same processing and same attention of information that is relevant for the goal and will overcome obstacles in the same way as consciously activated goals. The hypothesis therefore is that whether a goal is activated consciously or non-consciously, it will guide the behaviour and cognition that is needed to reach the goal.

Many researchers have seen the impact of non-conscious processes on behaviour, but they still believe that goal pursuit needs to be instigated by an act of conscious will. In other words, they don’t believe that goals can’t be activated without conscious will. The writers of this article, however, think that goals can be activated without conscious instigation. The writers think that goals are represented mentally just as other concepts are. Goals will therefore also become capable of automatic activation. When a goal is constantly activated in the same situation, the goal will become automatically activated when the person encounters that situation. The goal representation and the association of the situation will be linked together. This will eventually result in an unconscious process, because no activation will be needed for the goal. The contextual cues would be enough to activate the goal. Automatic goals are in line with a person’s valued goals and purposes.

Similarity between conscious and non-conscious goals

Chartrand and Bargh found that goals activated by environmental cues operated as effectively as when consciously chosen. They conducted an experiment in which they gave participants a Scrambled Sentence Test. In this test the words of a sentence were presented in a scrambled order and the participant was asked to put the words in the correct order. Some participants were exposed to words related to judgment and impression formation (judge, evaluate), while other words were related to memorization (absorb). The participants were asked to form an impression of a certain person and those participants that were primed with the impression formation words, had better free recall of the behaviours of the person they had to form an impression of than participants who were primed with the memorization words. These results show that primed information-processing goals have the same outcomes as goals that were consciously activated by will.

Experiment 1

In the first experiment participants were asked to fulfill a word-search puzzle. This was a 10x10 matrix of letters which contained 13 words to be found. There were two conditions in which participants could be put in. One condition was the high-performance goal condition and the other the neutral condition. As you can imagine, the participants in the neutral condition received a word-search puzzle with neutral words in it, like shampoo and river. The participants in the high-performance goal were asked to find words relevant to the concept of high-performance. Some of these words were ‘success’, ‘compete’, ‘strive’, ‘master’ and ‘achieve’. The words that had to be found were listed below the puzzle. After this puzzle, the participants were asked to do three other experimental word-search puzzles. This was the dependent measure of the study. These puzzles had three themes: foods, bugs and colours. This means that the words that were supposed to be found in those puzzles had to be from that particular category. The words that had to be found were not listed below the puzzle. In each puzzle, there were ten words hidden. The total number of words found in the three experimental puzzles was the dependent variable. The results of this experiment were that participants in the high-performance goal condition did better on the experimental word puzzles that participants in the neutral condition. This means that performance goals can become non-consciously activated and that they can regulate behaviour towards fulfilment of the desired outcome. Some critics might argue, however, that the participants wanted to find as many words as possible and that this means, in fact, that there is a conscious goal in place. This is the reason why the writers of this article conducted another experiment.

Experiment 2

The second experiment was basically a resource-dilemma task. The participants played against another presumed participant and they had divide the resources amongst themselves. They could choose to take everything for themselves or to cooperate. The dilemma was that if both participants took the maximum for themselves, the resources would quickly run out. So the participant basically had to choose between gaining the highest self-profit, or cooperating for the good of all. The participants were free in every choice they made. There were 2x2 conditions in this experiment: participants were either primed to be cooperative or not primed at all and they either had no conscious goal or a cooperation conscious goal. First participants received a variation of the Scrambled Sentence Test. In the priming condition, participants received words related to the concept of cooperation (like helpful, honest and tolerant). Afterwards, participants participated in a resource-management game. The participants were asked to take the role of a fisherman (there were two types of fishermen). The lake the fisherman fished in had 100 fish. They were told that the total amount of fish was not allowed to go below 70 fish. In every round the participant caught 15 fish and he or she had to decide how many fish he or she wanted to keep and how many fish he or she wanted to return to the lake. The participants all got a piece of paper on which they could see what would happen if they kept the fish and what would happen if they returned the fish.

There were two types of roles of fishermen. One fishermen type was primed with the conscious-cooperation-goal-condition and the other did not receive a conscious goal.

The participants in the conscious-cooperation-goal condition were explicitly told to cooperate as much as they could. There were a couple of rounds and in each round the participant had to decide what to do. Afterwards he or she had to wait until the other participant (which in fact were just the experimenters) had made his or her decision. After each round the participants received messages about how many fish there were in the pool. They always received the message that there were more than 70 fish in the pool. After five rounds (the participants didn’t know how many rounds the game would last) they were done and had to fill in a questionnaire with questions about cooperation. One of these questions asked how important it was to the participant to act in a cooperative manner during the game, while another was how successfully they felt in their cooperation.

The results showed that in the priming condition and the conscious-goal condition people cooperated. There was more cooperation in the conscious-goal condition. There was also much cooperation in the goal-priming condition and this shows that there is no conscious goal needed for the activation of a goal. There were no differences found between the answers on the questionnaire. The third experiment will look more at this.

Experiment 3

The writers thought that the priming task could influence the behaviour of participants. In a couple of studies some priming tasks have produced ambiguously relevant behaviour. The writers of this study were afraid that participants from the first study might have noticed that the priming task wanted to prime high performance and as a result they made the conscious decision to perform the best they can. Also, the writers thought that perceptual priming could have mediated between the goal-priming manipulation and the effects. They decided to use a delay manipulation. They did this to dissociate the perceptual and behaviour consequences of the priming manipulation. The delay manipulation means that the half of the group that received a certain priming task did the experimental task immediately after the priming task and the other half did it five minutes later. The participants in the no-delay task first had to draw their family tree. They had five minutes to do this. After this task, participants had to do a priming task in which they were primed to a neutral of high-performance condition. The participants in the delay condition were first assigned to the priming task and then to the family-tree task. Then they were either assigned to the word search task, this was the performance task, or to the impression-formation task (to read a story about a person and form an impression of this person). People in the delay condition had to wait five minutes after completing the priming task to begin with the independent measure, whereas people in the no-delay condition could do the independent measure immediately.

The results show that perceptual priming effects decay over time. The writers found that participants in the high-performance-goal related stimuli who were assigned to the impressions formation task saw the target person more as a high achiever than the participants in the neutral priming task. These effects, however, vanished after the five minute delay. In the word-search task, people in the high-performance condition performed good on the task, whether there was a delay or not.

Performance on the word-search task was even better for the participants in the delay situation than participants in the non-delay situation! This experiment shows that the performance in the high-performance-goal priming condition was due to the non-conscious activation of the goal to perform well.

Experiment 4

In the fourth experiment participants were again primed with either a high-performance-goal condition or a neutral prime. They then were asked to do a word-search task. In the previous experiments, participants received 10 minutes to complete this task. In this experiment, however, the time was cut short and while the participants were doing the task they were told through the room intercom system that they had to stop. This was two minutes after starting the task and the writers wanted to do this so they could see what the high-performance participants would do when they did not get enough time to fulfill their goal. In every room there was a hidden camera and the researchers wanted to see whether participants in the high-performance condition would continue working on their task to try and receive a higher score. After the stop sign, the participants could have continued for three minutes, because the experimenter came to collect the papers three minutes after the stop sign. The results showed that the participants in the high-performance condition kept working on the word-search task. Apparently, the non-consciously activated goal seems to be stronger than the consciously activated goal to stop performing.

Experiment 5

In the fifth experiment the researchers wanted to find out whether participants with a high-performance prime would want to keep going on with the Scrabble-word task or do another tests which was very enjoyable. Participants first did a word-search test with either a neutral or high-performance-goal prime. Afterwards they saw a set of seven letters on a projector screen and had to write down as many words as possible from the projector. This was the Scrabble-word task. But after one minute, the experimenter secretly switched the projector off (with a hidden button under his desk). He pretended that he was surprised and that he thought that the projector bulb was broken. He told the participants that he would leave the room to get another projector bulb. By the time he got back he said there was not enough time to complete the whole experiment and that the participants could choose whether they wanted to finish the Scrabble-word task or do a cartoon-humour rating task.

This cartoon-humour rating task meant that they had to rate how funny certain cartoons were. This task was obviously more fun than the Scrabble-word task. The results showed that a much higher proportion of the high-performance participants kept on doing the Scrabble-word task instead of the cartoon-humour rating task.