LEARNING OBJECTIVE
- Discuss the role of nonconscious, automatic cognitive processes in our attitudes and understanding of events, including our own behavior.
Automatic Versus Controlled Processing
How would you react if you saw a stranger at an airport coughing and sniffling? In the post-COVID world, you might fear that this person had COVID-19. The mind processes information in two ways when we encounter a social situation. One way is automatic and nonconscious, often based on emotional factors, and the other is conscious, systematic, and more likely to be controlled by deliberative thought. Often, emotional reactions occur before conscious thought takes over. Thus, your fearful reaction to the person might automatically kick in without any special thought on your part. But when you start thinking deliberatively and systematically, you realize that these symptoms are also consistent with a summer cold or allergies and that there’s no reason to suspect the person will start a superspreader event on the plane flight.
Automatic and controlled processing can result in quite different attitudes in the same person toward members of outgroups (Devine, 1989a, 1989b; Devine et al., 1991, 2002, 2012). People with low expressed prejudice toward an outgroup may nevertheless reveal feelings toward people in that outgroup that are almost as prejudiced as those of people who explicitly confess to disliking the group. For example, experimenters asked some White participants to read words stereotypically associated with Black Americans (for example, jazz, busing) and then read a brief description of someone whose race was not specified. Those participants were more likely to report that the individual was hostile than were participants who hadn’t read such words. And this was true regardless of whether they were willing to express anti-Black attitudes in a questionnaire—in other words, whether they were openly prejudiced or not. The judgments of the “unprejudiced” people were found to be just as prejudiced as those of their explicitly prejudiced counterparts when it came to nonconscious processing of information.
In general, automatic processes give rise to implicit attitudes and beliefs that can’t be readily controlled by the conscious mind; controlled, conscious processing results in explicit attitudes and beliefs that we’re aware of—though these may become implicit or nonconscious over time. It’s important to recognize, too, that participants in this experiment weren’t necessarily being dishonest when they reported being unprejudiced. They likely were genuinely unaware of the extent of the bias revealed by the implicit measures of attitude.
A variety of social categories, not just race, have considerable impact on judgments and behavior. Other easily discernible personal features, such as gender and age, also tend to trigger stereotypes that a person uses in forming judgments about other people, even when the person is unaware that these social categories have influenced the judgment in question (I. V. Blair, Judd, & Fallman, 2004; Brewer, 1988; Macrae, Stangor, & Milne, 1994).
Types of Nonconscious Processing
Social psychologists have shown that much of our cognitive activity is hidden from us. In solving problems, sometimes we’re well aware of the relevant factors we’re dealing with and the procedures we’re using to work with them. For example, when we solve a math problem (“Take half the base, multiply it by the height and . . .”), we generally know exactly what formula we’re using. But these sorts of cognitive processes—where we are conscious of most of what is going on in our head—are rarer than you might think. Often we can’t correctly explain the reasons for our judgments about other people, our understanding of the causes of physical and social events, or what led us to choose one job applicant over another (or one romantic partner over another, for that matter).
In one experiment making this point about awareness, researchers asked customers in a mall to evaluate the quality of four pairs of nylon stockings laid out in a row on a table (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Customers were four times as likely to give the highest rating to the last pair of stockings they examined as to give it to the first pair of stockings. Yet in response to whether the position of the stockings had influenced their judgments about quality, they were astonished that the questioner could think they might have been influenced by such a trivial, irrelevant factor!
Often we can’t even identify some of the crucial factors that affect our beliefs and behavior. John Bargh and Paula Pietromonaco (1982) presented words on a computer screen for one-tenth of a second. The duration of exposure was so short that participants were unable to distinguish words they had seen from those they hadn’t seen and didn’t even know that words had been flashed at all. Some participants were exposed to words with a hostile meaning and some to neutral words. The participants then read about a man named Donald, whose behavior was ambiguous as to whether it could be construed as hostile. (“A salesman knocked at the door, but Donald refused to let him enter.”) Participants exposed to the hostility-related words rated Donald as being more hostile than did participants exposed to the neutral words. Hundreds of other demonstrations have shown that important judgments and behaviors can be shaped by influences that people are unaware of. (See also Box 1.1 for more examples.)
- When people read a persuasive communication in a room with a fishy smell, they are less likely to be persuaded by it than if there is no distinctive smell present or if there is an unpleasant smell that isn’t fishy. This works, though, only in cultures where dubious propositions are described as “fishy.” (S. W. S. Lee & Schwarz, 2012).
- Asking people to rate the accuracy of a news headline causes them to subsequently share more accurate and valid news on Facebook (Pennycook et al., 2021).
- And here’s something you can try for yourself. Have a conversation with someone in which you deliberately change your body position from time to time. Fold your arms for a couple of minutes. Shift most of your weight to one side. Put one hand in a pocket. Watch what your conversation partner does after each change and try not to giggle when your partner mimics your body language. “Ideomotor mimicry” is something we engage in quite nonconsciously. When people don’t do it, the encounter can become awkward and unsatisfying.
You will read countless examples in this book of various stimuli and situations that exert their effects without our conscious awareness. Indeed, if the effects in a given study were consciously produced, you wouldn’t have to read about them in this book; you would already know about them.
Functions of Nonconscious Processing
Why does so much mental processing take place outside of our awareness? Partly, it’s a matter of efficiency. Conscious processes are generally slow and can run only serially—one step at a time. Automatic processes are typically much faster and can operate in parallel. When we recognize a face as belonging to a fourth-grade classmate, we have done so by processing numerous features (forehead, eyes, chin, coloring, and so on) holistically and in a fraction of a second. Recognizing each feature one step at a time would leave us hopelessly mired in computation. And it’s quite handy to be able to drive a car on autopilot while enjoying the scenery or carrying on a conversation. (You may sometimes have been startled to realize that you’ve reached your destination without being completely aware of how you got there.)
BOX 1.1
FOCUS ON EVERYDAY LIFE
Subtle Situational Influence
Words, sights, sounds, and other stimuli can influence how we act, for good or for ill, even when we’re not consciously aware of them. Consider the following findings.
- Want to make your employees more creative? Have them work in a green or blue environment—and be sure they don’t work in a red environment (Lichtenfeld et al., 2012; R. Mehta & Zhu, 2009).
- Green, as in environmental greenery, can help reduce violence. People living in public housing surrounded by greenery commit fewer violent crimes than do people in nearby public housing surrounded by concrete (Kuo & Sullivan, 2001).
- Want to get lots of hits on your dating profile? Wear a red shirt in your profile photo or at least put a red border around your picture. Both men and women are considered sexier when dressed in red or just surrounded by red (Elliot et al., 2010).
- Want taxpayers to support education bond issues? Lobby to make schools the primary voting locations. Want to get voters to outlaw late-term abortion? Lobby to have voters cast their ballots in churches. The associations people have to the buildings that serve as polling stations influence how they vote (Berger, Meredith, & Wheeler, 2008).
- Want people to pay more consistently for the office coffee they consume by putting the agreed-upon fee in the “honest box”? On the wall near the box, put up a poster of anything with eyes (even a symbolic stick-figure face). A nonconscious sense of being observed makes people more likely to be on their best behavior (Bateson, Nettle, & Roberts, 2006; Haley & Fessler, 2005).
- Want people to feel deeply concerned about the threat posed by climate change? Have them fill out a survey about carbon emissions in an especially hot room. People take the threat of global warming more seriously when they are feeling uncomfortably warm themselves (Risen & Critcher, 2011).
This list might remind you of the stand-up comic who follows a rapid-fire series of one-liners with the statement, “I’ve got a million of these.” And indeed, social psychologists have offered no shortage of demonstrations of the influence of incidental stimuli on people’s behavior. The most obvious implication of this research is that we can influence people’s behavior by changing the details of their surrounding physical environment. A less obvious implication is that if we want to free ourselves of these kinds of influences, we should try to consider important propositions and potential courses of action in a number of different settings, if possible. That way, incidental stimuli associated with the different environments are likely to cancel each other out, resulting in sounder judgments and decisions.
We’re not conscious of many of the stimuli that influence us, and we’re not fully aware of the cognitive processes that guide our judgments and behaviors. A very important implication of nonconscious processing is that research on human behavior should not normally depend on people’s verbal reports about why they believe something or why they engaged in a particular behavior. Instead, social psychologists must craft experiments to isolate the true causes of people’s behavior.
LOOKING BACK
Much of our behavior and many kinds of construal processes occur without our awareness—sometimes without awareness of even the stimuli that we are responding to. We tend to overestimate how accessible our mental processes are to our consciousness.