Abstract
In three experiments, we investigated the effect of unconscious social priming on human behavior in a choice reaction time task. Photographs of a basketball player passing a ball to the left/right were used as target stimuli. Participants had to respond to the pass direction either by a whole-body (complex) response or a button-press (simple) response. Visually masked stimuli, showing both a task-relevant cue (pass direction) and a task-irrelevant, social cue (gaze direction), were used as primes. Subliminal social priming was found for kinematic (center of pressure) and chronometric measures (response times): gaze direction in the primes affected responses to the pass direction in the targets. The social priming effect diminished when gaze information was unhelpful or even detrimental to the task. Social priming of a complex behavior does not require awareness or intentionality, indicating automatic processing. Nevertheless, it can be controlled by top-down, strategic processes.
Highlights
In three experiments, we investigated the effect of unconscious social priming on human behavior in a choice reaction time task
Based on three exclusion criteria, 8.7 % of the trials were removed in Experiment 1a, 7.5 % in Experiment 2a (0.0/3.4/4.4 %), and 8.1 % in Experiment 3a (0.0/3.7/4.7 %)
There was a significant decrease from Experiment 1a to Experiment 2a, t(41) = −5.88, p < .001, d = 1.79, and from Experiment 2a to Experiment 3a, t(42) = −4.24, p < .001, d = 1.28
Summary
We investigated the effect of unconscious social priming on human behavior in a choice reaction time task. Effects of subliminally presented stimuli (i.e., outside of subjects’ awareness) have been reported for trait and affective judgments in social p sychology[6,7] and for simple categorization tasks in experimental psychology[8,9] (button-press responses in a choice reaction time task). The most common method in experimental psychology to investigate a subliminal influence of stimuli on behavior is masked priming[14] In this paradigm, a masking stimulus follows a prime stimulus after a short delay of a few tens of milliseconds. In the last two decades, discussions of unconscious processing and automaticity were guided by theoretical frameworks under the general label of ‘two-systems theories’[17,18]. A considerable number of studies found misalignments between features (for an overview, s ee22), for example, processes which were unconscious but c ontrollable[23], suggesting that a gradual perspective on automaticity might be more appropriate
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