Papers by Melissa Ferguson
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2015
Recent findings in social psychology show how implicit affective responses can be changed, leadin... more Recent findings in social psychology show how implicit affective responses can be changed, leading to strong, fast, and durable updating. This work demonstrates that new information viewed as diagnostic or which prompts reinterpretations of previous learning produces fast revision, suggesting two factors that might be leveraged in clinical settings. Reconsolidation provides a plausible route for making such reasoning possible.
Journal of personality and social psychology, 2015
Research suggests that implicit evaluations are relatively insensitive to single instances of new... more Research suggests that implicit evaluations are relatively insensitive to single instances of new, countervailing information that contradicts prior learning. In 6 experiments, however, we identify the critical role of the perceived diagnosticity of that new information: Counterattitudinal information that is deemed highly diagnostic of the target's true nature leads to a complete reversal of the previous implicit evaluation. Experiments 1a and 1b establish this effect by showing that newly formed implicit evaluations are reversed minutes later with exposure to a single piece of highly diagnostic information. Experiment 2 demonstrates a valence asymmetry in participants' likelihood of exhibiting rapid reversals of newly formed positive versus negative implicit evaluations. Experiment 3 provides evidence that a target must be personally responsible for the counterattitudinal behavior and not merely incidentally associated with a negative act. Experiment 4 shows that participa...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2004
Do we always know the reasons for our actions? Or is our behavior sometimes unknowingly and unint... more Do we always know the reasons for our actions? Or is our behavior sometimes unknowingly and unintentionally influenced by what we have recently perceived? It has been traditionally assumed that the automatic influence of knowledge in memory is limited to people's interpretation of the world, and stops short of shaping their actual behavior. Researchers in experimental social psychology have begun to challenge this assumption by documenting how people's behaviors can be unknowingly influenced by knowledge that is incidentally activated in memory during social perception. We review findings that suggest that the social knowledge that is incidentally activated while reading words or imagining events subsequently affects participants' behaviors across a range of ostensibly unrelated domains.
Psychological Bulletin, 2000
The first 100 years of experimental psychology were dominated by 2 major schools of thought: beha... more 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.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2007
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004
Findings from 3 experiments suggest that participants who were actively engaged in goal pursuit, ... more Findings from 3 experiments suggest that participants who were actively engaged in goal pursuit, compared with those who were not pursuing the goal, automatically evaluated goal-relevant objects as relatively more positive than goal-irrelevant objects. In Experiment 3, participants' automatic evaluations also predicted their behavioral intentions toward goal-relevant objects. These results suggest the functional nature of automatic evaluation and are in harmony with the classic conceptualization of thinking and feeling as being in the service of "doing" (e.g., S. T. as well as with more recent work on the cognitive mechanics of goal pursuit (e.g., G.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2008
In this article, we analyzed the information processing that underlies nonconscious impression fo... more In this article, we analyzed the information processing that underlies nonconscious impression formation. In the Wrst experiment, the nonconscious activation of the impression formation goal led to a faster analysis of the trait implications of behaviors, compared with a control group. In Experiment 2, participants who were nonconsciously primed with an impression formation goal were more likely than those in a control condition to form associations in memory between behaviors and implied traits. In Experiment 3, nonconsciously primed participants were more sensitive than those in a control condition to whether inconsistent trait information was relevant or irrelevant to the actor's disposition. Moreover, in Experiments 2 and 3, those with a nonconscious goal showed just as much evidence of impression formation as those who were consciously and intentionally trying to form an impression. Implications for nonconscious goalpursuit and impression formation are discussed.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2005
Findings from three experiments suggest that participantsÕ automatic evaluations of subliminally ... more Findings from three experiments suggest that participantsÕ automatic evaluations of subliminally presented objects influenced how they interpreted subsequent, unrelated objects. Participants defined homographs (Experiment 1), categorized objects and people (Experiment 2), and made person judgments (Experiment 3) that all could be disambiguated in either a positive or negative way. ParticipantsÕ responses to the ambiguous targets were evaluatively consistent with their automatic evaluations of preceding, semantically unrelated objects. The findings suggest that oneÕs automatic evaluations can influence deliberate judgments of subsequent stimuli, even when the only shared dimension between the initially evaluated objects and the judged objects is an evaluative one. The implications of these findings are discussed with regard to possible mechanisms of evaluative priming as well as previous research concerning evaluative priming effects on social judgment.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2005
The social psychological literature on automatic social inferences has focused on one construct t... more The social psychological literature on automatic social inferences has focused on one construct that helps explaining human behavior-traits (e.g., . The dispositional roots of behavior, however, go beyond relatively stable constructs such as traits to include more transient causes such as oneÕs intentions and goals. Evidence from young infants and adult chimpanzees, knowledge acquired in the text-comprehension literature and hypotheses derived from the Automatic Causal Inferences framework (Hassin, , seems to converge: they all suggest that perceivers may automatically infer goals from behaviors. This paper reports four studies that examine this hypothesis. The first two use surprise cued-recall, and look at goal inferences when the road to goal achievement seems straightforward and when it seems blocked. Studies 3 and 4 use on-line methodologies-probe recognition task and lexical decision-to examine whether these inferences are made at encoding.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014
People possess information or identities that it sometimes behooves them to conceal, but at what ... more People possess information or identities that it sometimes behooves them to conceal, but at what cost? Participants who were instructed to conceal information during a short interview--either their sexual orientation (Studies 1-3) or specified words (Study 4)--showed evidence of self-regulatory depletion. Concealment led to deficits in intellectual acuity, interpersonal restraint, physical stamina, and executive function. We decomposed depletion into 2 component processes that, together or separately, might contribute to the observed depletion. When actively concealing information, one must monitor for specific content to inhibit. If taboo content is detected, one must modify or alter one's speech from what one would have said otherwise. Concealment produced depletion even when there was no need to actually alter one's speech (Studies 2 and 4), demonstrating that monitoring one's speech for content to conceal was sufficient to cause depletion. In contrast, having to alter one's speech without having to monitor for specific content to inhibit--either by adding false content (Study 3) or inserting specific words into one's speech stream (Study 4)--did not lead to measurable depletion. In this way, the studies are the first to assess which part of an act of self-regulation--monitoring for specific behavior to override or the actual altering of that behavior--is responsible for observed depletion. Furthermore, the research suggests that social environments that explicitly or implicitly encourage identity concealment may prevent people from performing optimally.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2000
Humans continuously evaluate aspects of their environment (people, objects, places) in an automat... more Humans continuously evaluate aspects of their environment (people, objects, places) in an automatic fashion (i.e., unintentionally, rapidly). Such evaluations can be highly adaptive, triggering behavioral responses away from threats and toward rewards in the environment. Even in the absence of immediate threats and fleeting rewards, the ability to automatically evaluate aspects of the environment enables individuals to effortlessly make sense of their world without depleting limited and valuable cognitive resources. We discuss two lines of research on automatic evaluation: The first demonstrates that people can evaluate a stimulus even when they are not conscious of the stimulus and thus unaware of having evaluated it. The second line of work shows that even when people are conscious of a stimulus, they may evaluate it without intending to do so. We end by discussing current theoretical questions regarding this topic.
Cognition & Emotion, 2011
Previous research shows that the activation of a goal leads to more implicit positivity toward go... more Previous research shows that the activation of a goal leads to more implicit positivity toward goal-relevant stimuli. We examined how the actual pursuit of a goal influences subsequent implicit positivity toward such stimuli. Participants were consciously or nonconsciously primed with a goal, or not, and then completed a goal-relevant task on which they succeeded or failed. We then measured their goal-relevant implicit attitudes. Those who were primed with the goal (consciously or nonconsciously) and experienced success exhibited more implicit positivity toward the goal, compared with the other conditions. We discuss the theoretical implications for understanding the role of implicit attitudes in self-regulation.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009
While the study of nationalism has received much attention throughout the social sciences and hum... more While the study of nationalism has received much attention throughout the social sciences and humanities, the experimental investigation of it lags behind. In this paper we review recent advances in the examination of implicit nationalism. In the first set of experiments we survey, the Palestinian, Israeli, Italian, and Russian flags were primed (or not, in the control conditions) and their effects on political thought and behavior were tested. In the second set the American or the Israeli flag was primed (or not) and prejudice toward African-Americans or Palestinians (respectively) was examined. The results of all experiments suggest that the implicit activation of national cues has far-reaching implications on political thought and behavior as well as on attitudes toward minorities. Under the assumption that the image of national flags is associated in memory with national ideologies, these results suggest that national ideologies can be implicitly pursued in a way that significantly affects our thoughts and behaviors.
Motivation and Emotion, Dec 1, 2004
Motivation and Emotion, Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2004 ( C o 2004) DOI: 10.1007/s11031-004-2390-4 ... more Motivation and Emotion, Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2004 ( C o 2004) DOI: 10.1007/s11031-004-2390-4 ... The Editors express appreciation to the following individuals, who reviewed articles for Volume 28 (2004). ... Gary Adams Austin Albino Lauren Alloy Bill Arsenio Greg Ashby Avi Assor Jim Averill Alvaro Barriga Kenn Barron Larry Barsalou Bruce Barthalow Roy Baumeister George Bear Lenonard Berkowitz James Bliss Margaret Bradley Nyla Branscombe Kirk Brown Charles Carver Daniel Cervone Jason Colquitt Regina ...
Page 1. CHAPTER 4 VOLUNTARY ACTION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIAL-PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY UC BAYER... more Page 1. CHAPTER 4 VOLUNTARY ACTION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIAL-PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY UC BAYER, MJ FERGUSON, AND PM GOLLWITZER 1 Introduction Social-personality psychologists have ...
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Papers by Melissa Ferguson