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Three experiments tested the hypothesis that consciously intended goal pursuits have unintended consequences for social judgment and behavior. From evolutionary theory (Dawkins 1976/2006) and empirical evidence of a nonconscious mode of goal pursuit (Bargh, 2005) we derive the hypothesis that most human goal pursuits are open-ended in nature: Once active, goals will operate on goal-relevant content in the environment, even if that content is not the intended focus of the conscious goal. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that goals to evaluate a job applicant for either a waiter or crime reporter position also shape impressions of incidental bystanders in the situation, such that the bystander is later liked or disliked not on his own merits, but on how well his behavior matches the criteria consciously applied in evaluating the job applicant. Experiment 3 finds that a goal to help a specific target person spills over to influence actions toward incidental bystanders, but only while active. Implications of these findings for goal pursuit in everyday life are discussed.
Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
- Aldous Huxley
In the 30 years since the seminal paper on social construct priming by Higgins, Rholes, and Jones (1977), researchers have reaped an abundant and varied harvest of priming effects (see review in Dijksterhuis, Aarts, & Chartrand, 2007). "Priming" refers to the passive, subtle, and unobtrusive activation of relevant mental representations by external, environmental stimuli, such that people are not and do not become aware of the influence exerted by those stimuli. The ease and ubiquity with which priming effects have been obtained, across a wide variety of higher mental processes such as are involved in social judgment and behavior, has revealed the openness of the human mind to environmental influences, and concomitantly a rather reduced causal role for intentional, conscious processes in those higher mental processes (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). Perceptual activity, just by itself, can trigger a wide variety of higher mental processes, through the automatic activation of mental representations containing within them affective, behavioral, and motivational responses and tendencies (Bargh, 1997).
The accumulated priming research has shown that environmental stimuli are often the instigators of complex behavior within social interactions, as well as of goal pursuits extended over...