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Related Experiment Videos

How social perception can automatically influence behavior.

Melissa J Ferguson1, John A Bargh

  • 1Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. mjf44@cornell.edu

Trends in Cognitive Sciences
|December 31, 2003
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Our actions can be unconsciously shaped by recently perceived information. This research shows that incidental social knowledge activation influences behavior, challenging traditional assumptions about automatic influences on human action.

Area of Science:

  • Experimental social psychology
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Behavioral science

Background:

  • Traditionally, automatic memory influences were thought to affect interpretation, not behavior.
  • Recent research questions this by exploring unconscious behavioral influences.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To review evidence on how incidentally activated social knowledge influences behavior.
  • To challenge the assumption that automatic memory activation is limited to interpretation.

Main Methods:

  • Review of experimental social psychology findings.
  • Examination of studies where social knowledge was incidentally activated (e.g., reading words, imagining events).

Main Results:

  • Incidental activation of social knowledge can significantly affect subsequent behavior.

Related Experiment Videos

  • This influence occurs across various domains, even when unrelated to the activation task.

    • Conclusions:

    • Human behavior is susceptible to unconscious influences from activated social knowledge.
    • The automatic activation of memory extends beyond interpretation to shape actions.