Beyond behaviorism: On the automaticity of higher mental processes.

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

The first 100 years of experimental psychology were dominated by 2 major schools of thought: behaviorism and cognitive science. Here the authors consider the common philosophical commitment to determinism by both schools, and how the radical behaviorists' thesis of the determined nature of higher mental processes is being pursued today in social cognition research on automaticity. In harmony with "dual process" models in contemporary cognitive science, which equate determined processes with those that are automatic and which require no intervening conscious choice or guidance, as opposed to "controlled" processes which do, the social cognition research on the automaticity of higher mental processes provides compelling evidence for the determinism of those processes. This research has revealed that social interaction, evaluation and judgment, and the operation of internal goal structures can all proceed without the intervention of conscious acts of will and guidance of the process.

Related collections

Most cited references 70

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Social categorization and intergroup behaviour

Henri Tajfel, M. Billig, R. P. Bundy … (1971)

0 comments Cited 848 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

On the automatic activation of attitudes.

R. Fazio, D M Sanbonmatsu, M. C. Powell … (1986)

We hypothesized that attitudes characterized by a strong association between the attitude object and an evaluation of that object are capable of being activated from memory automatically upon mere presentation of the attitude object. We used a priming procedure to examine the extent to which the mere presentation of an attitude object would facilitate the latency with which subjects could indicate whether a subsequently presented target adjective had a positive or a negative connotation. Across three experiments, facilitation was observed on trials involving evaluatively congruent primes (attitude objects) and targets, provided that the attitude object possessed a strong evaluative association. In Experiments 1 and 2, preexperimentally strong and weak associations were identified via a measurement procedure. In Experiment 3, the strength of the object-evaluation association was manipulated. The results indicated that attitudes can be automatically activated and that the strength of the object-evaluation association determines the likelihood of such automatic activation. The implications of these findings for a variety of issues regarding attitudes--including their functional value, stability, effects on later behavior, and measurement--are discussed.