John Bargh

John A. Bargh (born 1955) is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory.

Bargh's work focuses on automaticity and unconscious processing as a method to better understand social behavior, as well as philosophical topics such as free will.

Much of Bargh's work investigates whether behaviors thought to be under volitional control may result from automatic interpretations of and reactions to external stimuli, such as words.

Bargh is particularly famous for his demonstrations of priming affecting action.

One of the most well-known of these studies reported that reading words related to elderliness (e.g., "Florida", "Bingo") caused subjects to walk slower when exiting the laboratory, compared to subjects who read words unrelated to the elderly.

Though cited more than 5,000 times, controversy has emerged because several recent studies failed to replicate the finding.

He attended the University of Illinois as an undergraduate, where he graduated in 1977 with a B.S. in psychology.

He then attended the University of Michigan, where he earned an M.A. in 1979 and a Ph.D. in 1981 in social psychology under Robert Zajonc.

That same year he was hired as an assistant professor at New York University, where he remained for 22 years.

He has since been working at Yale where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory.

Bargh was influenced by the work of his Ph.D. advisor at the University of Michigan, Robert Zajonc, who concentrated on the fundamental processes underlying behavior, including an emphasis on affect and cognition.

Much of Zajonc's work touched upon processes that occur outside of awareness.

Bargh's work in automaticity and unconscious processing further explores the extent to which information processing occurs outside of either intent or awareness.

In contrast to Ellen Langer, who denigrated such mental processing as "mindless", Bargh followed the lead of William James in stating that automatized (or "habitualized" in James' terminology) processing can be a beneficial adaptation.

Bargh's research focuses on the influence of environmental stimuli on perception and behavior, automatic activation, the effects of conscious and unconscious priming, the psychological effects of physiological stimuli, and implicit cognition.

Bargh's concentration on the influence of unconscious and automatic behavior and cognition grows from a fundamental interest in the construct of 'free will.'

Exposure to stimuli in the environment can influence how individuals make impressions of others.

Bargh and Pietromonaco randomly assigned subjects to be exposed to words that were either related to hostility or were neutral.

The words were presented outside of the subjects' conscious awareness.

In a second task, all subjects were asked to read an ambiguous story about a man and rate him on various measures.

Those subjects that were subliminally exposed to words related to hostility rated the man more negatively than those subjects in the control condition.

Stimuli may be automatically evaluated in ways that affect behavior, an automatic evaluation.

In a study conducted by Chen and Bargh, subjects were faster to pull a lever toward themselves (an approach tendency) when a word had a positive valence than a negative valence, and were similarly faster to push the lever away (an avoidance tendency) when the word had a negative valence compared to a positive valence.

The "sequential evaluative priming paradigm" refers to the related phenomenon of response times reducing when primed by stimuli with congruent valence.

In an examination of the generality of the effects of this paradigm, Bargh, Chaiken, Govender and Pratto show that simply seeing or hearing mention of stimuli triggers automatically activated evaluations.

This occurs even when the subject has not been asked to think about their evaluation of the stimulus beforehand.

It was further shown that novel stimuli are automatically evaluated and produce the same effect as nonnovel stimuli: when positively valenced novel stimuli prime positively valenced targets, reaction time is faster.

Stimuli presented outside of awareness have also been suggested to influence the interpretation of subsequent ambiguous and semantically unrelated stimuli.

Thus subjects asked to define homographs after being subliminally primed with positive, negative, or neutral valence words subsequently evaluated the valence of the ambiguous words with that of the prime.

In Stereotype priming, subjects are primed with a stereotype or with people associated with those stereotypes.

Subsequent behavior tends to be consistent with the stereotype.

For instance, subjects primed with the concept of the elderly while doing a simple task, later walked more slowly when leaving the experiment than did subjects in the control group.

Subjects that were primed with African American faces reacted with more hostility toward experimenters.

(The first experiment in this paper primed the concept of politeness vs. rudeness (vs.

a neutral control), and showed that people behaved in line with these primes afterward. These studies are small, though (e.g., Experiment 1: n=34).)

The authors are clear in drawing a distinction between the priming used in these studies and the myth of subliminal messages.

Starting in 2013 and 2014, many additional reports began to emerge of failures to replicate findings from Bargh's lab.

These included "social distance priming" and "achievement goal priming" and lonely people's preferences for hot baths.

(However, in 2015 there was report, by Bargh and Shalev, of a successful replication of the association between loneliness and bathing habits, published in the journal Emotion, indicating a possible role for cultural differences in this case.) In March 2015 yet another paper from Bargh lab was reported to be unreproducible: Rotteveel and colleagues sought to duplicate two studies by Chen & Bargh (1999) arguing that objects are evaluated automatically, triggering a tendency to approach or avoid.

Bargh was born in Champaign, Illinois.