Automatic activation of impression formation and memorization goals: Nonconscious goal priming reproduces effects of explicit task instructions.

Abstract

According to the auto-motive model (J. A. Bargh, 1990), intentions and goals are represented mentally and, as representations, should be capable of nonconscious activation by the environmental context (i.e., priming). To test this hypothesis, the authors replicated 2 well-known experiments that had demonstrated differential effects of varying the information-processing goal (impression formation or memorization) on processing the identical behavioral information. However, instead of giving participants the goals via explicit instructions, as had been done in the original studies, the authors primed the impression formation or memorization goal. In both cases, the original pattern of results was reproduced. The findings thus support the hypothesis that the effect of activated goals is the same whether the activation is nonconscious or through an act of will. One's current intentions and goals affect not only what one considers important enough to pay attention to, but also how one uses, interprets, and subsequently remembers that information. Although that is a noncontroversial statement today, it was a radical departure from the dominant view of perception when Bruner and Postman (1948) originally proposed it. To claim that motivation influences perception was a major break with the then-dominant view that perception and judgment were entirely stimulus-driven (Stevens, 1951 ). The result of their claim that needs and motivations influence perception was the New Look--a flood of studies demonstrating that an individual's goals greatly influence which information the individual attends to and perceives in the environment, as well as how he or she interprets and remembers that information (Allport, 1955; Bruner, 1951, 1957). Jones and Thibaut (1958) subsequently introduced this idea to the domain of social perception, describing the influence that various potential interaction goals might have on selective attention to and use of information about one's interaction partner. After a period in which motivational and cognitive accounts of phenomena were viewed as mutually exclusive and competing instead of complementary and interdependent (see Gollwitzer & Bargh, 1996; Sorrentino & Higgins, 1986b), there recently has been a significant advance in theory and research on the motivation-cognition interface (e.g., Chaiken, Giner-Sorolla, C Goilwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996; Higgins &