Split-second evaluations shape our moods, actions

Immediate automatic reactions influence how we interact with the world, researchers find.

By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

In physics, every action elicits an automatic reaction. And now, in psychology, many researchers are concluding that everything we see, hear, touch or smell garners an automatic and unconscious cascade of associations that can affect attitudes, actions and mood.

'We like to think that we intend and plan most of our behaviors and our reactions, but in reality we don?t,' says New York University psychologist John Bargh, PhD. Instead several automatic, preconscious mechanisms are at work behind the scene shaping our moves, our moods and our actions. Conscious thought only comes in after the initial response and helps us understand our behavior.

Bargh identified this idea that our actions and reactions are not mediated by deliberate, conscious mental processes as one of the common themes running through the research of Stanford University psychologist Robert Zajonc, PhD. Along with Deborah Apsley of the University of Michigan, Bargh recently organized and hosted a Festschrift at Michigan honoring the esteemed scientist?s career. At the Festschrift, several researchers presented data supporting this concept that we have less control over our thoughts and actions than we think.

Attitudes and actions

Bargh?s research on automatic evaluation has yet to find an object that doesn?t stimulate an immediate appraisal of either good or bad. He and his colleague Shelly Chaiken, PhD, find that everything from objects to abstract art to nonsense syllables activate a positive or negative attitude within the first 200 milliseconds after encountering them?before the person is consciously aware of them.

In the most extreme test of this theory, Chaiken, Bargh and then graduate student Magda Garcia, PhD, exposed people to nonsense words used originally by Zajonc in his original 'mere exposure' attitude research, for example 'jandara' and 'ikiktaf.' They found that people evaluated them as good or bad without meaning to or knowing that they had.

'We?re finding that everything is evaluated as good or bad within a quarter of a second of seeing it,' says Bargh. Such unconscious evaluations may set the tone for how we interact with people as well as objects, he adds.

Bargh also has evidence that the human tendency to mimic the behavior of others may stem from an 'automatic expressway between perception and behavior' rather than any conscious desire to ingratiate oneself or create an empathic bond with others. He and graduate student Tanya Chartrand tested the hypothesis that merely observing a behavior increases the likelihood a person will engage in that behavior him or herself.

In one study, for example, they asked participants to sit and examine a series of photos with another person?someone covertly working for the researchers. During the interactions, the confederate either rubbed her face or shook her foot. As predicted, without knowing it, participants shook their own feet more with the foot-shaking confederate and rubbed their faces more with the face-rubbing confederate. Even more interesting, the researchers found that participants who scored highest on a standard empathy scale tended to mimic more than those who scored lower.

In another study, Bargh and Chartrand turned the situation around, having the confederates mimic the posture and movements of participants. After the interaction, participants who were mimicked tended to rate the interaction as having gone more smoothly and the confederates as more likable than those who hadn?t been mimicked. These findings imply that the automatic effect of perception on behavior stimulates empathy in both the ape and the aped.

Mood and self-esteem

Not only do people, objects and words trigger attitudes and actions, but they may also affect mood and self-esteem, according to work by University of Winnipeg psychologist Mark Baldwin, PhD.

As a postdoctoral fellow working in Zajonc?s laboratory at the University of Michigan in 1984, Baldwin began to examine whether exposure to a stimulus can unconsciously affect one?s judgement. He found that a group of psychology graduate students rated their own research ideas worse if, before making the judgement, Baldwin exposed them to a scowling photo of Zajonc, who had a reputation among students of being a tough evaluator. He also has evidence that women are less excited by sexy stories in Cosmopolitan after thinking about their parents. And Catholic women feel more anxious after reading the stories if they have been exposed to a picture of the Pope. Interestingly, the Pope didn?t affect nonpracticing Catholics, Baldwin finds.

These studies support the idea that activating thoughts of an authority figure who may disapprove or judge you?with a photo or any other cue or reminder?appears to affect mood and self-evaluations, says Baldwin.

Everything from objects to abstract art to nonsense syllables activate a positive or negative attitude within the first 200 milliseconds after encountering them?before the person is consciously aware of them.

From these studies, he has moved on to test the idea that certain social situations may trigger mental schemas that then affect mood or behavior. To test this idea, he and University of Manitoba student Kelley Main experimentally created associations between tones and notions of approval or disapproval.

As 56 women completed a 60-item computer questionnaire about their likes and dislikes-including questions such as 'what is your favorite ice cream flavor' and 'what is your favorite color'?the computer gave them periodic feedback about how their answers measured up to 'ideal' norms.

A smile of acceptance, paired with a tone, indicated ideal answers and a scowl of rejection, paired with a different tone, indicated 'wrong' answers. The feedback was actually bogus, adding up to 10 smiles and 10 scowls.

Five minutes after the questionnaire, participants met with a male experimenter who was friendly, but who let awkward pauses occur in the conversation in an attempt to invoke social anxiety. During the conversation, one of three tones beeped in the background: the acceptance tone, the rejection tone or a novel tone.

The tones had a significant affect on self-reports of anxiety, Baldwin and Main found. Women who heard the rejection tone were more anxious, on average, than those who heard the acceptance tone, indicating that the tone triggered thoughts of disapproval.

When Baldwin and Main separated out women who rated high on a fear-of-negative-evaluation scale, they found an even more striking result. Women who reported little fear of negative evaluation didn?t feel particularly anxious when they heard either tone. But women who tended to be highly anxious about negative evaluation were quite anxious if they heard the rejection tone, and calm when they heard the acceptance tone.

'The main effect was all accounted for by the people high in anxiety and low in self-confidence,' says Baldwin. For them, the rejection tone made them more anxious and 'the approval schema over-rode their natural tendency to be anxious.'

These types of automatic schema triggers may be at work all the time, affecting how we relate to the world, says Baldwin. And various stimuli will affect people differently, depending on their own personal tendencies. Perhaps understanding our automatic reactions may eventually help us overcome impulses we dislike.

Participants in the Zajonc Festschrift, the University of Michigan, May 15?16

? Mark Baldwin, PhD, University of Winnipeg, 'Does Bob Zajonc ever scowl at you from the back of your mind?'

? John Bargh, PhD, New York University (co-organizer), 'Zajonc and the psychology of the mere.'

? Jerome Bruner, PhD, New York University, 'Zajonc and the reality of emotion.'

? John Cacioppo, PhD, Ohio State University, 'Discriminating hostile from hospitable events: attitudes and the brain.'

? Susan Fiske, PhD, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 'The ebb and flow of affect and cognition in social psychology.'

? Nico Frijda, PhD, University of Amsterdam, 'The nature of pleasure.'

? Janusz Grzelak, PhD, University of Warsaw, 'Cognitive and motivational determinants of conflict resolution.'

? E. Tory Higgins, PhD, Columbia University, 'Beyond pleasure and pain: the psychology of promotion and prevention.'

? Hazel Rose Markus, PhD, Stanford University, 'A sociocultural, historical analysis of the mind of a Polish-American social psychologist, or deconstructing Bob.'

? Sheila Murphy, PhD, University of Southern California, 'Feeling without thinking: affective primacy and the nonconscious processing of information.'

? Claude Steele, PhD, Stanford University, 'Bob Zajonc and the art of science.'

? Yaacov Trope, PhD, New York University and Tel Aviv University, 'How preferences influence inferences.'

? Grazyna Wieczorkowska, PhD, University of Warsaw, 'The youngest child of Robert Zajonc: Institute for Social Studies of Warsaw University.'

APA will publish a book of papers from the Festschrift.