The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals.

TLDR

It is proposed that goals can be activated outside of awareness and then operate nonconsciously to guide self‑regulation effectively. The study reports five experiments that prime either a performance or cooperation goal without participants’ awareness to examine nonconscious goal activation. Experiment 3 employed a dissociation paradigm to rule out perceptual‑construal explanations. Priming the performance goal improved intellectual task performance, priming the cooperation goal increased resource replenishment, and Experiments 4 and 5 showed that nonconsciously activated goals exhibit classic content‑free features of conscious goal pursuit, demonstrating that such goals effectively guide action and adapt to situational demands.

Abstract

It is proposed that goals can be activated outside of awareness and then operate nonconsciously to guide self-regulation effectively (J. A. Bargh, 1990). Five experiments are reported in which the goal either to perform well or to cooperate was activated, without the awareness of participants, through a priming manipulation. In Experiment 1 priming of the goal to perform well caused participants to perform comparatively better on an intellectual task. In Experiment 2 priming of the goal to cooperate caused participants to replenish a commonly held resource more readily. Experiment 3 used a dissociation paradigm to rule out perceptual-construal alternative explanations. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that action guided by nonconsciously activated goals manifests two classic content-free features of the pursuit of consciously held goals. Nonconsciously activated goals effectively guide action, enabling adaptation to ongoing situational demands.