Varieties of social cognition

ABSTRACTRecent work within psychology demonstrates that unconscious cognition plays a central role in the judgments and actions of individuals. We distinguish between two basic types unconscious social cognition: unconsciousness of the influences on judgments and actions, and unconscious of the mental states (i.e., attitudes and feelings) that give rise to judgments andactions. Influence unconsciousness is co roborated by strong empirical evidence, but unconscious states ar difficult to verify. We disc ss proce ures a med at providing con lusive evide ce f tate un nsci usness, and apply them to recent empirical finding.KEYWORDS: implicit social cognition, unc nscious cogni ion, implicit measures, priming, automaticity, consc ousnessAfter reading words related to stereotypes of the elderly, such as “Florida ” and “wrinkle, ” people tend to walk more slowly (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Being subliminally exposed to pictures of African American males makes people hostile, and thinking about professors improves their performance at Trivial Pursuit (Bargh et al., 1996; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). People are more likely to mistakenly judge a male to be famous, and an African American to be a criminal (Banaji & Bhaskar, 2000; Banaji & Greenwald, 1995; Payne, 2001). Based on these and other similarly dramatic findings, we and many other psychologists have come to agree with Bargh and Chartrand (1999), who proposed that: “... most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes that are put into motion by features of the environment and that operate outside of conscious awareness and guidance ” (p. 462; see also Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001)