Unconscious behavioral guidance systems

[Music] so now it is my pleasure to present to you today or introduce today dr. John barge dr. barge is received his BA degree from the University of Illinois champaign-urbana and his MA and PhD in psychology from University of Michigan where he worked with Bob science after graduation he took a faculty position at NYU and stayed there until 2003 when he moved to you dr. barges research focuses on unconscious mechanisms that underlies social perception evaluation and preferences and motivation and goal pursuit in oh and what did i do there let's see you know you really need to see this picture right while I'm talking so there we go okay and motivation and goal pursuit in realistic and complex social environments based on his experimental work also dr. barge is written extensively on the concept of free will and the purpose of consciousness itself dr. barge is a recipient of numerous honors and awards including an early career award from the American Psychological Association the Don Campbell Award for distinguished scientific contributions from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology the scientific impact award from the Society of experimental social psychology the annual research prize from the Max Planck Society among others in addition dr. barge was a Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies and behavioral science we were very fortunate to have him here with us today the title of his talk is unconscious be unconscious behavioral guidance systems please join me in welcoming dr. barge today I think my computer was mercifully trying to protect you I've seen my photograph up there for so long so well these new very very smart computers its senses what the audience wants let's see here we go here we go from the beginning please okay all right now the last thing someone who's been around as long as I have wants to do would want to do would be to tell you all the research from all the long time ago and all the old stuff from the 80s and 90s and all that what what a person like me wants to do is to get right to what I'm doing now and to tell you what's going on in our lab now because it's something I'm excited about interested in its might and burnt my mate where my head is at so what I think I'm going to do is the following and I'll to to live up to the theme of the of the talk which I whole talk will will be consistent with the the lecture series this year is to give you a little bit of background I'll sketch out some background but then I'll use the more modern research as examples of all of this and so it really will fit with this idea of unconscious behavioral guidance systems but I don't want to spend too much time on the old stuff so essentially what we've got here are in social cognition social psychology a long history of research on priming priming referring to the passive activation of mental representations and this is not merely a descriptive slide this actually corresponds to dissociations and different systems that have different operating characteristics when they're primed but you basically get external environmental priming effects aspects of the environment features the environment that are perceived activating and doing and doing their thing in these different systems causing evaluations of everything is either good or bad activating motivations are tied to situations and and perhaps evolutionary evolved innate motivations and also we also perceive what everybody else is doing and so there are of that perception for example in social psychology and social cognition was a whole lot of research on stereotyping this is a definitely an automatic effect of superficial features of a person skin color gender easily perceived features of the person and activate representations about that group and what that group is like that happens all this stuff from the left these things happen without conscious intention and without necessarily conscious awareness that these things are going on what has happened in the in the 20 years were so since that research is that all of these different priming effects activating systems have been found to proceed on without conscious guidance or intention or or the necessity at any conscious intention or awareness to affect behavior to directly affect behavior so that the entire sequence from the outside environment to behavioral and other higher mental processes is something that's not the consciousness it's not needed for it can all proceed without conscious intention and without conscious awareness as you'll see later on there's and that's an interesting feature because that was not predicted and it was not known from the beginning that this would happen that these different effects on judgment and on goal-setting and on perception would then all directly affect behavior but each of them for different reasons do affect behavior directly and that suggests that there is something evolved and natural and an adaptation involved here with priming effects because they would have to affect behavior for them to be something that would guide adaptive responses prior to the advent of consciousness which was a relatively late evolutionary development so the fact that these the all go and effect behavior is a signal that there is some basic element of the system as a default system to guide behavior and to guide responses to back to the environment without the necessity of consciousness so this is like a default system now now we have consciousness now we have another route to these systems but this was the original this was the old one and I'll make an argument later that a lot of the effects that are being shown today are actually acceptations or scaffolding built on these original hardwired or innate kinds of structures that that consciousness makes use of those but they pre-existed existed before consciousness the idea of unconscious behavioral guidance systems is that we have a system here that keeps us tied to the precedent keeps suggesting to us impulses to the correct or the appropriate or at least the safest kinds of behaviors we can enact in an environment which frees the conscious mind to do what it does best which is going to which is time travel which is going to the past remember the past or des plan and set agendas for the future now this is a present oriented system and it keeps us tied to the present in a very fairly adaptive way but it frees the conscious mind to time travel otherwise if you're remembering the past or thinking about the future you get eaten by your Missouri tiger right right then and there and your minds not going to be aware of it you got to have some some feature some system tying you to the present to allow that time-travel to happen so it's a mutually supportive and complimentary system but that's the basic idea of unconscious behavioral guidance systems the breakthrough research is showing that each of those separate kinds of systems does directly flow on and affect behavior but in different in different ways with different mechanisms those I'll try to sketch so the last part of the talk i'd like to feature the newer research that's been going on is in the cult embodiment research or it's called a variety of different things we like to call it physical priming of psychological states this is not exactly the same as when people talk about embodied emotion or simulations or the storage of bodily experiences sensations in the memory representation of events it's not really embodiment but certainly in harmony of the general idea of embodiment and I'll use the research here for as examples and this is the more research that's coming out of our lab like the last 10 years so going back to the unconscious behavioral guidance system idea the first kinds of effects were shown I'll going back to Russ Fazio and the automatic attitude activation research in the 1980s and social cognition essentially anything you encounter activates attitudes activates feelings and effects associated with it very heart in harmonious with Damacio somatic mark or hypothesis that you have these kind of affective reactions and those are those are relatively fast immediate and also you don't need to appraise or try to evaluate things they happen by themselves coding of a classifying of experiences or objects whatever as either good or bad it's fairly crude but that's the that's the first part and the next is that it turns out that each of these evaluations do directly affect behavioural predispositions to act towards the object muscular behavioral arm and leg and so forth bodily movements and again this all happens within say 200 milliseconds of exposure to the stimulus okay so you know we we have immediate reactions to things this is what my adviser Bob science was preaching back in the you know late 70s early 80s that we have effect without cognition we have effect without having to deliberate and think about what we do all the time we immediately see this male baby polar bear and we all a cute little polar bear and we like it we not to think about why I love them do I like it well it has soft fur and it has a pleasant expression it looks cute hmm I like it it's not like that at all so you have this immediate reaction and that makes sense in the sense in the case of cute little polar bears and so the the central kind of studies that were done with the value to priming were sequential priming a la Posner and Schneider on this kind of a paradigm and this was response and of a innovation to apply a sequential priming to effective priming it turns out that if you put something that's good as a prime very shortly thereafter something else if the chairs valence they have the same valence you're gonna be faster to respond and not just to respond good or bad to evaluate it but also to pronounce the target to to lot to lots of different say of the target is a word or non word it doesn't matter any response to the target is facilitated if the prime other precedes it even though they're unrelated semantically otherwise shares valence and you're slower if they if they don't the the original research limited this effect to very strong attitudes but Kimberly Duckworth Shelley Chaiken and I and others have been showing for some time that you actually get this effect for everything even weak attitudes like Fortuna it's not just for those cute little polar bears and you even get it for novel attitude objects like abstract art non representational abstract art it's not a picture of something it's it's numbers representational but you can actually get the same immediate evaluation effect for these for these abstract of things that people have never seen before in other words for novel stimuli so this system is there to to evaluate our experience as good or bad and and give us the appropriate response to make back as shown by the next study which shows that the effect really isn't a direct effect on behavior as much as it's mediated by a motivational approach or avoidance motivational state that is triggered by the evaluation so that good evaluations trigger an approach orientation or approach behavioral response and bad things a trigger immediately avoidance or withdrawal response and that is how the evaluative system affects behavior in this automatic non conscious way so for example if you have people now in this study by mark Chenin myself published in 1999 what we had people do was to have a lever and on the computer screen in front of them were just names of different kinds of attitude objects both good and bad and they came on at random times the subjects task participants task was just to move the lever either to push it on half the trials pull it on half the trials counterbalanced to knock this word off the screen so all they were doing was playing a crude little video game and and reaction time almost and knocking things off the screen but it turns out when the name of the attitude object wouldn't when the attitude object on the screen was positive people were faster to pull it towards them using the flexor muscles which are associated of John Cacioppo pose research for example with approach motivations like you're bringing the Apple to you and they were faster to pull when something was positive slower when something was negative and they were also the converse they were faster to push the lever if it was something negative and not when it was something positive and that kind of effect has been replicated many times and this is again within 200 milliseconds after exposure and they weren't trying to evaluate they were just trying to knock these things off the screen so what you see is you have an immediate good or bad class of a classification of experience this effect also happens with novel objects if you get another group of people to norm them as good or bad and then have naive people have never been exposed to them see these you get the same you get the same effect with novel stimuli too so even with things we've never seen before we very adaptively are ready to do the approach or avoidance it's crude but it's default it's a basic default I don't know anything else to do but by you know just as a crude first pass here's what you'd want to do here you want to approach or you want to avoid so that's evaluation and it goes mediated by that route perception which is we're going to spend the most time on later this is Ben for some time we know for example the flocks of birds and herds of antelope and schools of fish have incredible synchrony and movement they can all move as one as one unit well they're not like looking around and saying hey buddy bird over there is going that way I think I'll follow buddy bird or you know us Sammy fish is going the other way they're not thinking about this and not not deciding to move one way or the other but by merely perceiving what the others in their group are doing they do the same thing so it's a direct link between perception and action perceiving what others do in their group creates a tendency in themselves to do the same thing now you may have heard of this in other and other domains for example mirror neurons but the idea here is that well maybe people are the same way and you know there's some evidence it even little guys you know imitate the the big guys around them and you know this is natural for kids because they're soaking up what the right thing to do is they don't know the norms they don't know what's right or wrong I'm safe and unsafe yet and so they're really looking at the big people to get cues about what to do and soaking those up so just like these guys these guys you know are also doing the same kind of thing so you have this principle lots lots of places in psychology William James called it the principle of ideomotor action for James it was conscious thought however thinking about doing something makes it more likely you'll do it just merely thinking about it we have a lot of you know history of research the gestalt is colder Kafka others you know in the 20s mimicry imitation you got the work more recently meltzoff and other people showing a imitation even a newborn infants right off the bat of crying of other infants makes them more likely to cry you got giacomo rizzolatti and and others and his colleagues more recent research on mirror neurons and how that supports theory of mind essentially that witnessing misses and monkeys as well as people but witnessing a behavior in conspecific or actually in the case of the monkey research and a human experimenter actually activates the same tendency to do the same thing yourself in other words it activates areas of the premotor cortex staging areas for actually behaving yourself and so obviously that's a support for the kind of finding that I'm going to talk about in the more social psychological domain if you have people interact with each other on a task where they're working on something on the table and talking but not really looking at each other too much and just really working on the same task on a table we can set that up so a Confederate is playing the role of the other participant in that paradigm and the Confederate is either rubbing her face or in another version shaking her foot the actual participant of does this task with one and then the other in a counter balanced order and you find when they're with the face rubbing Confederate they're rubbing their own face much more and when they're worth the foot shaky and Confederate they stop rubbing their face so much and they start shaking their foot a lot more and now people when when you tell them about this and these experiments usually don't believe you that this is not what they were doing and then often our participants asked to see the videotape of themselves doing it we could you know show it to them and they could see oh this is something we all do not just participants in psychology experiments I do it too and everybody does it it's just a very natural tendency because of perception in activating the tendency of the representations to do the same thing yourself so it's a very natural social phenomenon and lots of different animals and in social psychology we know however that perception is not just merely perceiving what's going on right now in the environment it's not just physical information about you know shake foot shaking or face rubbing but we all we often go beyond the information given in our perception so for example when we perceive a member of minority groups or certain groups in society we stereotype then we have content added to what's what's out there in the environment but assumptions expectations based on group membership for example that's going beyond the information given and Jerome Brunner's famous phrase so well what that suggests is that maybe it's not just a physical you know perception of what's going on right now in the environment that causes these effects on behavior but also trait concepts and stereotypes if activated in the course automatically in the course of a social perception they too would proceed on and affect your own behavior now it's not out there but it's activated in here and that might have the same effect so we can extend these perception behavior effects to stereotypes and trait concepts for example the first one we picked on was the con was the elderly stereotype this is an actual street sign from London England and I'm not sure but I'm hoping there's not like 20 point or something like underneath this you know like the idea here is to watch out and be careful these old people are over are bent over and slow and walking with canes it's an actual street sign and and so the stereotype of old people of older people or elderly people as being physically slow and weak is certainly a very strong stereotype in lots of societies and so what we first did was to prime the elderly stereotype activated with aspects of it like Florida bingo oranges but also gray and conservative and things like that in what's called a scrambled sentence test and I'll show you that later but verbally and these were 19 18 19 year-old NYU students they weren't older people and we did that and then we just measured know that the key thing about our priming with activating the concepts we did not have anything in our Prime's having to do with slowness or weakness and we're trying to show people go beyond the information we present them we didn't prime slowness or weakness we just find the idea of elderly people but because the stereotype contains it we assumed slowness and weakness would be active and that would cause a person to be slower weak and that's what we found so what you get in both of these experiments as the the people primed with the elderly stereotype and of course I use grey bars here are actually walking down the hall leaving the experiment more slowly than people who are in the control condition who are not playing with the elderly stereotype now that's a 1996 finding since then there's been dozens if not hundreds of them demonstrations of stereotype priming effects and you get them for you know so many different things I don't want to spend too much time but for example activating the nurse a stereotype of a nurse makes people more helpful afterwards activating the stereotype of a politician causes people to me be more verbose they talk longer and write longer after you prime the idea of a stereotype if you activate the idea of prime people with German Shepherds are more loyal to their group in in-group out-group kinds of experiments afterwards and the first one by Dijkstra house and then qanitin' Berg up there in the upper left if you prime the idea of professor people do better on Trivial Pursuit questions except sports the SOT the hooligans the hooligans over there in the upper right do better on the sports questions but they do worse on everything else now they're not hooligans they're not anything these are just people like you and me but the idea has been activated of a soccer hooligan study done in Holland or professor or so forth so these are people like you and me and this is what happens when these concepts are activated so this is a pretty ubiquitous effect and pretty pervasive effect you don't get it just with aspects of people or types of people you get it with aspects of situations for example contextual cues a hippie type backpack the study done in Stanford you know in a room causes people to be more cooperative and a prisoner's dilemma game afterwards study Aaron K and Lee Ross and I did Kristin wheeler a long time ago and if it's a briefcase in the same place against the door of the room people are more competitive in a prisoner's dilemma game and the mere object of my backpack back here but you know a backpack or a briefcase and the door by the door is all it takes to produce these significant differences in cooperation or competition it has helped these these effects have health implications of Jennifer Harris who's now working with Kelly Brownell at the Rudd Center of research on obesity and eating disorders at Yale she was a graduate student in my lab and we started looking at the effects of television ads these are cues or repetitive cues in TV ads and how that would directly affect a person's eating behavior so we had people watch a five-minute comedy show that had naturally in it food ads or not we actually looked at healthy versus unhealthy types of food like Kashi versus McDonald's that didn't make any difference interestingly but they were food ads or not and then we had a bowl of goldfish crackers and a water thing for them to while they're watching just you know if they wanted anything didn't tell them - ipoh I've just had that there for them we just looked to see how much they ate these were eight-year-old kids and college students and forty or fifty year old adults in these various studies and the presence of the food ads in the clip increase the consumption of goldfish crackers by 45% so you know my message to people is this these guys in these ads they know what they're doing and you think that what they're doing is making so you remember the product name so you go to the store and you're buying laundry detergent and you how many million as you've seen four suds own soap and so you go home sons oh I want to buy suds oh that's not what they're doing with these ads they're trying to create their to effect your consumption at home while you're watching these ads so that you'll have to buy more tomorrow they're trying to affect your consumption now so you need more tomorrow of all these different things they're selling so because they know they can do it and so I'm what I'm trying to say is let's not all Ben be naive as a field to think that we're the only ones doing this kind of research and so we're you know giving the game away to advertisers now they have huge amounts of money for research and development and sixty something billion dollars is spent on advertising in worldwide that maybe it's just the u.s. each year and are not spending that money for nothing they're spending that money because it works and it does work and I think they know this already we've been demonstrating it because we suspect that so if they were up to that's a real-world application of the idea of priming people who are trying to lose weight or whatever are not helped by this at all but you know what are you gonna do food ads but it's the way they do the ads is causing this additional consumption you get the same thing with smoking and I hate to say it you get the same thing with non smoking anti-smoking ads because they're full of cues to smoking they're talking about the word smoking they're showing cigarettes they're showing cues to smoking we've already done that study anti smoking non-smoking ads increases smoking in our participants we give them a chance to have a break and come back for the rest experiment break is a code word as many of you may know for having a smoke if you haven't had one in your smoker and we let them go they go outside and they smoke and we can actually see them from our lab window when the car you are doing that priming effects contextual priming effects who you vote for or what you vote for it affects outcomes of election this is a Jonah Berger study at Stanford now he's at work in school but what they showed was that I think this was done with Christian wheelers is a great paper if you vote in a school you're more likely to vote for school related issues like bond issues if your precinct happens to be in a school and that's you know it's it just happens your voting booth is in a school like a gym or in many places in the south and maybe other parts of the country people vote in churches and if you vote in a church people who vote in church are more likely to vote in line with religious and Church positions you know that but looking at the precincts and you can look at the actual vote here's public record you can see at these different precincts was it at a school or as a church and how people voted even in the same community you get these kinds of differences so timing is not just laboratory little tricks this is something that happens out there and really affects people in important real-world decisions and there's a wonderful Peary's of papers on the broken windows theory which came out in science it's a bunch of Dutch researchers and this is a really wonderful paper showing that the cues to disorder or cues to graffiti or cues to vandalism that kind of thing here are the two conditions and this is actually these aren't these aren't the stimuli these are the actual scenes where the settings in the actual environment in Holland where they collected the data if for example there's no graffiti on the wall now what they did was they put little flyers on all the bikes he feels pieces of paper that the experimenters put those on there like little ads or something or announcements of a dance or a concert and they just want to see how many people took it and dumped it on the ground and if there was no graffiti there very few people took those things and dumped them on the ground if there was graffiti on the wall significantly more people took those things and dumped them on the ground and that's the whole idea behind broken windows theory is that these cues we're seeing out there are setting norms they're telling us just like that little kid following the two adults what is the right thing or appropriate or okay thing to do here or not and we're very sensitive to what other people do they have this in a variety of different demonstrations so so you know priming effects or what's going on how you perceive how other people are behaving in your world is a very strong influence on what you do yourself and it has social implications now the motivational system idea is basically that you have to start with the idea that goals and motivations can be represented or represented they correspond the cognitive representations believe it or not this is a relatively new idea they sort of a merging of motivational and cognitive science but it's not that that long ago that that was not done if that's true if motivations and goals corresponding representations they should be able to be prime just like everything else is that we've been talking about that is they be could be activated by environmental features that are relevant or associated with them if those motivations are triggered they can guide behavior over the long term not just a single behavioral response but guiding behavior over longer periods of time that's if motivations or goals can be primed if they correspond to representations got a lot of research goal systems theory Rea Krug Lansky and colleagues Ayelet Fishbach at Chicago our lab to goal would sirs lab lots of people arts and Custer's in Holland looking at these unconscious motivational effects it was a nice piece by arts and arts and Custer's in science in 2010 a big review piece on the unconscious will that reviews a lot of this evidence so it's it's it's gaining some status at least as a viable model of unconscious motivation but it certainly corresponds to the other kinds of priming we're talking about there's different kinds of unconscious goal pursued findings that we've been associated with in our lab first of all you can you can prime different effects of memorization and and impression formation just like you tell people to memorize something or you tell people to form an impression cut with explicit instructions you get different effects there's actually differences between those conditions on later memory for information if you instead prime them with the idea of impression formation or memorization but don't but give everybody the same vanilla everybody in the experiment the same vanilla instructions please read these will ask you questions later just something generic you get the same differences as when you tell them can't you tell them explicitly to do these different tasks so it doesn't you don't have to use even explicit conscious instructions it's just priming you replicate the past research on that on that difference for example a scrambled sentence test that might prime impression formation might look like this except that in the actual study there's thirty items and there's there's nothing highlighted in orange that's just for my screen it is but it's it's great that's what the actual participant sees but but this is this is a inducing this kind of processing in a context of a language test and so no one catches on that what they do here is affecting anything they do later just essentially what a priming study is you can actually you can increase performance on tasks by priming achievement or priming the idea of high performance and dual wit sitter and I have a lot of studies on that now that people's performance on a variety of tasks is better if you prime the idea of achievement in various ways and interpersonal goals like cooperation competition and so forth can also be can also be primed I've given you that one example the briefcase and the and the pack and Prime cooperation versus competition and people having them merely think in a very incidental way about close people in their lives like their parents their siblings their spouses their children whatever activates the goals that people have that are associated with that person so for example we selected NYU students who had said earlier in the semester that what they their important goal with their mother and father is to make them proud 55% said that the other 45% did not say that they have other goals with their parents make them happy help them whatever but not make them proud but the people who have the goal of making their mom proud if you just merely have them think a report like what's their mother's neighborhood look like or draw a map of the neighborhood or tell me what your mom doesn't on Saturday afternoon you get that goal activated and they score higher they achieve more have higher scores on tests afterwards so the incidental exposure reminders of people in our life activate the representation we have of them but that also contains within it things like goals and motives we pursue in with them and can cause you to behave as if they were physically present when they're not in other words they're psychologically present but they're not physically present and so goals can be associated with close relationships and this is a studies that Grandia Fitzsimmons and I did and published awhile ago oh this is a longer one about competition cooperation but it gets into a point that's going to lead into the the rest of the talk which is time is rapidly flying away so so here what we do is we give people a Resource Commons dilemma where they're a fishing company there's another fishing company and the other side they're competing against that company the same time they don't want to over fish because if they take too many fish out they kill the lake there's no fish for anybody so that here's a class a commons dilemma where you want to do the right thing and make a profit for yourself at the same time if you overdo it you kill the goose that's laying the golden eggs and you don't want to do that so you have to cooperate a little bit so we tell them about that and we say on each trial you're gonna win you're gonna catch a certain number of fish and you want to catch as many as possible but you don't want to kill the lake and take all the fish out so you might want to put some fish back and they were told for every fish they put back they get you know more fish the next time to repopulate the lake so you've got competition and cooperation going on in the design we we compare explicit priming of cooperation or no cooperation we tell them it's very important to cooperate or we don't tell them that and we prime over here I think this was done subliminally actually cooperation or not so you have a in the same design the priming or unconscious activation of the goal and you have the conscious activation of the goal and it turns out you can see from the data the more the higher the number the more they cooperated the more fish they put back in out of a total of maximum 75 and you see that you get significantly greater cooperation when they're told to do it great you also get the main effect of the priming so that unconscious goal to cooperate also increases cooperation compared to a control condition and the two add together you get the most cooperation when you have both you at the least cooperation we have so you see basically the same outcome is being produced by telling people to do something versus priming it and not telling them to do it explicitly you get the same effect now interestingly what happens afterwards if you ask people how cooperative have were you how strongly did you intend to cooperate during the task and so you get a rating of how much they had meant to or tried to cooperate and in the explicit condition those actually correlate with what they actually did at a moderate level so significant correlations between their subsequent self reports of what they had just done right after they had just done it with with their behavior some correspondence that more people cooperated the more they said they cooperated except you don't get that in the priming condition you get zero correlations which means that the only way you go in and can have an accurate idea of what you had just done is if you go in with that intention you go in knowing this is what your intention is if your induced to do it even though you do it later on you you can't even report accurately that you had just done it so our argument is that these motivations not only are activated outside of awareness that then they then operate and guide behavior over time without your awareness of what you're doing and this is the best evidence we have so far of that now unconscious motivational effects show the classic Louie nyun Kurt Lewin's a classic concept of signature states of a motivation signatures of a motivational state even though people don't know that they're pursuing these goals they still persist at it in the face of obstacles they still resume a task its interrupted if they have the goal to complete it and will complete it as opposed to people who are not motivated to complete the task and there's also consequences for what they do afterwards so for example if you prime people of achievement and then interrupt in this in this case we told them that they had to stop when they heard a stop signal coming over an intercom and but there was no one present in the room they heard the stop signal but they kept working trying to find as many letters in this series of Scrabble tiles as they could in the achievement condition 50 something percent continued after they were told to stop in other words stopping is an obstacle to get the highest score possible in this wonderful psychology experiment and they really care so much if they keep writing down words for three minutes afterwards looking at the door all the time to make sure they don't get caught doing it this is just a psychology experiment this isn't the SAT okay and the neutral condition that could care less in fact we have a we ran them simultaneously we have one videotape where the person neutral condition actually puts down the pencil and it has fallen asleep by the time the other person is still working writing down words people will resume a task that they've even though it's boring if they have the achievement motive primed this is a boring word search task but the task they can switch to if they want to is a rating how funny these various Gary Larson far side cartoons are everyone prefers that wildly to the boring task and yet if you have this mode of operating again unconsciously you'll return you'll choose to return and finish the boring task and and eschew the the more fun task and obviously people in the neutral condition don't so you get the same qualities of motivational States as you do with conscious impression formation and I'll go through this relatively quickly but essentially you also get the same kind of mood effects if you succeeded or failed at a task at a goal you don't even know you have this is tiny chart trans dissertation at NYU priming people but then giving them a sort of filler task where they it's either impossible to do or easy to do but there's told it's filler but if they succeed on the easy version they are they show great mood effects that if it was easy they're in a great mood and it was difficult they're a poor mood even though this was not going to be collected that's not that important in the nine prime condition they weren't affected at all by whether they had done the easy or the difficult task on you get the same effect for if they pursue this in the future motivational strength so very unconscious we out of things you can do and a mentation or increase and strength of things you can do without even realizing you have the goal in the first place so you get all the effects all the effects of conscious motivation but you do it without the person having the motivation consciously so now you're faced with a situation where you get the same outcomes you get the same phenomenal qualities the same I didn't put this up here but you've got now emerging a neuroscience research showing that you get the same brain regions activated with incentives if they're aware versus not aware of the incentive you get the same behavioral effects the same brain regions activated but with differences and people being aware versus not aware of the incentives flashed right before the trials is a handgrip exertion exercise this is specifically Oni and Chris Fritz work at the University of College of London so you get an same processing saint-just everything is the same and that begs a question how come is it that we have these conscious goals and all the properties get taken into the unconscious with routinization or a sublimation or is it something else and the something else is is what I'm going to talk about next and the something else is that well perhaps it's the other way around and perhaps we're always talking about consciousness first and then things becoming unconscious like habit formation or skill acquisition it could be that these circuits and these these are already there and that what consciousness is doing is making use of pre-existing or already existing unconscious motivational systems and that's how we get the same outcomes we get the same processing stages and everything else but they were always there in the unconscious motivation prior to the advent of consciousness in evolutionary time and that's why we get this great similarity and what that would predict then is you can prime infants you can prime kids you can prime little kids who don't have the wholly adult experience that is believed to be necessary to have something become automatic or unconscious and research is definitely starting and showing this kind of thing you can prime kids this is a study where the children were made to be more helpful to others they're 18 months old but by showing to kids next to each other like in the upper left people out the kids were then more helpful and in the studies that came after to other kids into the experimenter and compared to the condition the lower right where if they're facing away from each other they're only 18 months old but these are cues to what the appropriate behavior is they're primed and they do the behavior just like adults this could not be if it's only a lot of experience in adulthood that makes these things operate out of consciousness out of awareness this clue that this is there at birth or this is there very early on these structures are already there so this is the basic argument that these processes these adaptive processes had to exist before consciousness came online because we are always purposive and we had to do the right thing and to the the adaptive thing otherwise you wouldn't have survived well what was guiding our behavior in adaptive and and correct ways through natural selection prior to the advent of consciousness you basically have to have a system that does this without consciousness which is what we're finding which is what we're finding with all these unconscious effects that there was a very nice system already in place and it's still in us now and still influencing us now so and again I made that point that this model would predict that all of these effects then would have to go on to affect behavior why because natural selection only operates on an overt outward behavior it doesn't operate on what's going on in the head it can't select for these things if there's no external expression of it it has to be out there and behavior to be selected for and so if these things are that at a patience they have to affect behavior and we didn't know this when we started it turns out that's the case it also helps explain things like where these impulses come from we've got a lot of interesting studies like libet's time in the mind classic study Wagner's Michael Gazzaniga William James everybody on this list has said that consciousness is not in fact I should add Baumeister Massa compo last years of psych review article they say the same thing there they've come to that conclusion over some time but basically the consciousness is not for the generation of impulses of what to do it's it's not for that William James also said that it's not the source of these impulses consciousness is more like a gatekeeper allowing some through and not others in other words guarding with the expression of these impulses but not generating the impulses because then I got Lebed and and Wagner didn't say anything about where the impulses came from at all but they said that these impulses are what and prior to our conscious awareness of what we're doing what we're showing is where the impulses come from I mean what you can put priming research in that context and say here's the impulses they're coming from the outside world are activating these systems they all lead to behavioral predispositions those are the impulses and this is new this is something that has been suspected for a long time but I think it fits in really nicely there so the last point here and where it leads into the the research I was going to talk about I thought I would is that then new processes are going to be building on exacting on sort of a classic accrual kind of idea of natural evolutionary influences and natural selection that things don't get rewired when we when we develop consciousness if we didn't throw everything else in our brain away you didn't go away you can't do that things build on what's already there if there's a good trick a thing that works then then that's exactly then the new the new processes or more abstract ones make use of them so given all of that logic this leads to the physical stuff because we're trying to argue that that abstract concepts are based on early experience or concepts that exist very early in life and what are those concepts that exist very early in life and many many people have argued herb Clarke Lake off I think this is Coleridge Jean mandler and Roger Shepard and others have all argued in the pre verbal child the concepts are spatial because that's the information that's there they don't have to retrieve anything from memory which they don't know how to do yet they don't have to do anything internally in terms of mental skills it's all out there for them to form concepts with distance spatial concepts and also we would include physical sensations exploration through touch through the hand haptic haptic influences how the how the little kids exploring vision and touch is is creating concepts about the world and they're gonna be early in the early ones in and her Clark says distance is the absolute first concept the infant forms and in his sort of logical analysis of this so a lot of people are saying this and so this is the basis for what we're going to talk about next oh I have time also include goals here - not just physical concepts but actually evolved or concrete pre-existing goals and motives for example for purity survival reproduction avoidance of disease that more abstract social goals are built on those pre-existing structures and now here's the evidence for it we've got evidence coming up not from our lab but Jen bosons lab at Toronto at the Rotman School showing the Macbeth effect and the effect of remembering something you did that was really bad and then wanting to make reparations for that and and people in the control condition do and want to give money to charity more than a control group if they remember something bad they did but not if they were allowed to for a bogus reason use hand wipes or Purell and wash their hands before the dependent measure was collected physically washing the hands also cleanse the guilt also cleanse the soul so you've got basically a physical manipulation influencing a psychological state and this is the kind of research that we're doing - okay so here we go you got a lot of oh boy yeah it looks good on the screen basically the four types your spatial verticality and distance of the next one temperature and that actually the next day are not meant to be highlighted anyway but the first I'll talk about spatial verticality and distance and and these are perceptual effects so they're operating through the perceptual system except that maybe not the outside environment but but the body the body sensations are the physical of the art of the features priming as influenced by the environment and Tomas ubers in research here is very very very relevant because he shows effects of verticality such that we have this metaphor we have power mapped on verticality so high low we talk about high status low status we talk about looking up to somebody you're looking down on somebody we talk about your highness and these these words these metaphors are smoke smoke suggesting or telling us there's a fire there the fire is we're saying these and using these physical terms for a reason it's not just linguistic convention it's around the world and it actually is showing this is how we are thinking this is how this is the relation between the physical and the end the social we use physical terms all the time to talk about psychological or social variables and there's a reason for that Don Campbell's wonderful 19:56 psych review article on the evolution of vision the evolution of vision is basically a and all these different species independently and what what it gains for us is distance it gains for us safety and distance we don't have to bump into the predator or bump into the bad thing we can see it from a distance and we gain safety and obviously it's a reproductive advantage it's a something that's selected for and all of that so basically you've got 80% of the brain which is devoted eyes and vision trying to gain distance and trying to maintain or to establish distance and so distance is very important to the brain you've got Kurt Lewin talking about psychological distance emotional distance we all these things are if they listen to the words we're using we're talking about distance a distant father a close relationship we're using these spatial terms about distance all the time to refer to these social the social effects in the Milgram study the closer people were physically to the victim the less they shocked even than when they were unfortunately holding the guy's hand down still 30% of them shocked the guy all the way to the end but at least it wasn't 63% but emotional distance we know very well John Bowlby talked about this very important for for any for a variety of animals to keep close to the caretakers to keep close distance to the caretakers and also to keep away from predators since for safety and the ones who did the little ones who did well had an advantage and they didn't want if the ones who wandered off were the ones who were helpless and did not survive to reproduce so the attachment theorist Bobby has said the same thing Lawrence Williams and I have done several studies priming people with physical distance so they just plot points on a Cartesian grid of graph paper and so they're plotting points either relatively close or relatively far from each other and that's all they do and that's one experiment fine and then physical priming basically and then we have them fill out or indeed dependent measures that have to do with and that have to do with emotional distance or have to do with other kinds of distance so you get emotional distance affects people aren't as upset by a embarrassing media and not as much physiological reaction to two terrible horrible pictures you get an effect an economic task same thing and you also have people if they say all they did was plot the points relatively far versus relatively close and there significantly less likely in that condition to want to go home for the winter holidays for Christmas to see their family and friends all they've done is plot these points here versus here on the graph paper so there's there's psychological distance now that we has been induced physical priming of a psychological state temperature this is unfortunately but temperature is the one that we've done the most with with we've done the coffee studies the coffee study is basically building on Solomon ashes insights a long time ago warm and cold being central important traits to how we think about people Susan Fiske has followed that up with lots of research showing warm and cold that dimension is is there in stereotypes of in groups sorry of out groups hundred different countries around the world so it's very much a cross-cultural effect it's very important to how we think about people it transforms how we think about people and so forth and so Lawrence and I just asked the question who said why do we why do we call this warm I mean when you look at fist she says this is really comes down to a friend or foe assessment are you with me or against me and so I don't use friend or foe and why do we use warm and cold but we do and we always have in fact if you look at Ash's original stuff and you find out why he picked warm and cold he doesn't know he just he doesn't explain it he just says he why I picked these the experimenter thought these would these would work that's all he said you couldn't get away with that now but that was like a JP SP type article back then the experimenter believed that this would work he doesn't explain also there are no other central traits in social psychology were taught all but central traits plural but there's no other ones he doesn't give any others besides warm and cold so it's very important to how we think about other people one and you know with Harlow studies just to point out if you probably really aware of these studies with the poor little monkeys raised in isolation without their parents without a caretaker another monkey either with a wire mother or a cloth mother and just to get to the to cut to the chase we all know about the the creature comforts a tactile comfort they that they did pretty well when they were with the mother that had the cloth compared to the wire mother but what they don't really feature and we're not taught very very well is that there was a hundred watt light bulb behind that cloth there was no 100 watt light bulb on the left side so basically the cloth was nice but it was the warmth and these these poor little monkeys actually turned out to be fairly okay socially they weren't great but the ones with just the wire we're just cried and huddled and SCHIP and shook them and hugged themselves and pathetically in the corner at least the ones on the right interacted and could do something and actually reproduced at a not great but they weren't like monkeys raised with a monkey caretaker but the warmth actually in this case substituted for the missing social warmth or the missing maternal or paternal warmth and that's what we're doing here ash had these words warm and cold and showed differences in impression formation and all we did was substitute whether people briefly held a cup of hot coffee or iced coffee before they did the study and just briefly here hold this verse at thank you I'll get your papers here thank you very much and they filled something out very incidentally briefly they briefly held the hot or cold coffee and you basically and you got the exact same effects that that ash did with the words warm and cold notice everybody in the study saw the same six traits when they formed impressions same condense in straights for everybody the only thing different is that they briefly touched the hot or cold coffee they were more likely to then give their compensation for the experiment to a friend in a form of a gift certificate compared to the cold condition so they're more pro-social and more generous after touching something warm versus something cold you've have lots of other labs now showing these effects Zhang and Li are dinelli cold and lonely Hans Yzerman Geun sameen has a lot of studies and we have a neural neural study as well I'm going through this fairly quickly so here all the different studies independent variables dependent variables and you get basically effects of this of social coldest on physical temperature estimation so if you've just been excluded by a group you think the room temperatures colder then if you've been included by the group so you've got social coldness social warmth affecting physical sensations of physical warmth and physical coldness and you can reverse that with the hot and cold beverage then you have people thinking that other people are you know friendlier and pro-social towards others so it's a bi-directional effect you get lots of different dependent variables and lots of different labs yuna kang jeremy gray Peggy Clark and myself published this last year an imaging study showing the same part of the human insula reacts both the physical temperature cold and warm in imaging as it it does to be trails of trust and economic social coldness so you get the same regions the same left anterior insula area connected and sorry activated and the two regions within the left anterior insula are connected with a gradient and that's a that's a bud Craig's work which is more recent in 2009 so it looks like the warm cold effect is even hardwired that physical warmth creates feelings of social warmth and vice-versa with with cold now maybe I'll end soon because I'm I can I can just roll through all of these but I think this is where it and this time I'm now out of time and now I'm wanting to tell you all the fun stuff I'll just keep right if you tell me to stop I'll stop um the the thing is we've known about this metaphors for one thing we use it in our language all the time we have this you know housewarming what's a housewarming it's it can happen in the summer you don't have to warm the house in the summer physically but it's house warming by having everyone a neighborhood come and greet the new people to the neighborhood and that's called house warming we use these words all the time and here's you know caught hot coffee and I always you know offer people hot coffee when they come to my office and you know I'm now I'm understanding maybe why I'm doing it but I'd the the interesting thing to me is that we've had this knowledge and actually I think is affecting our behavior implicitly without the explicit knowledge of the effect because it was we knew it already you wouldn't get these things published you know it wouldn't be surprising this is coffee studies but if the difference here is is interesting to me so you get this all over the place you get it all over the world this idea of warm your warm hearts warm smiles something warm meaning pro-social meaning friendly and not physically warm we've got the Budweiser ads at Christmastime you know the Clydesdales were our stomping around and at the end of the ad the door opens there's a warm fireplace right there at the end now here's where to me it gets even more interesting because I was watching a documentary on Hell which is something I love to do on the History Channel and this documentary was all talking about the nine levels of Hell for Dante and in gruesome horrible detail as much as they could and here's and I saw this I couldn't believe it now there were nine levels the lower you go the worse you were okay there's nine levels this is ninth the murderers for Dante are in level seven this is Satan he's a level Knight what is Satan do who what is level nine now remember in Dante in the inferno the punishment fit the crime contra Passos these were punishments poetic like poetic justice fits the crime what happened in the level nine number one these were people who betrayed the trust of others close to them Satan betrayed God in Dante's Inferno Satan is chewing on Judas Iscariot's head so around us a Satan in the inferno are other people famous for betraying other people who were close to them social coldness how are they punished the only place in hell talk about how freezing over I mean they were frozen in ice the punishment for Dante that fit the crime of betrayal was physical cold in the middle of fiery hell fire and brimstone so I thought hey 1308 we knew this we knew this enough but more than that it turns out there's a wonderful book visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante for people interested in what people thought Hell was like and turns out the Apostle Peter st. Peter also wrote it in his apocalypse one line hell has rivers of fire and of ice for the cold-hearted that's a basically one that's 2000 years ago right so I'm sure if you try you might find something even earlier but we've known this implicitly now do we know it implicitly in terms of our own behavior and here's the last thing I want to talk about I mean I there's more but I think I could I could end on this one and that is if we know it implicitly that well maybe we use it maybe we substitute ourselves like Harlow's monkeys you know Harlow did for the little monkeys maybe we substituted ourselves physical warm for social warmth if it's missing from our lives that leads to certain predictions and I'm again pushing the point that this is implicit intuitive knowledge we have it's affecting our behavior without our knowledge of why we're doing what we're doing but it's a very big effect so he deed Shalev who's a wonderful researcher who's in Israel who came visited a Yale for a year and so we did all these studies together and they're just impressed now at emotion and we ask people very simply to fill out questionnaires about low or whether they and and things they want to do during the day they either do the loneliness scale you see they loneliness Gail first or they did a second or they did the daily activities we were presented as separate studies the daily activities included how often they take baths and showers these are Yale students to begin with and how hot they like the water temperature to be how long they want the how long they usually stayed under the water and it turns out that the lonely you're these students are the more they take baths and showers the hotter they want the water to be significantly for the baths and showers the longer they stay under the hot water all of these are significant now before you say lonely stinky Yale students and who you know how do you generalize beyond that the first thing I thought of we want so we went out to a community sample and the town green and so the average age of the community samples 43 years old and these were older people than the town green you get the same effects they're not as strong but very strong fairly good correlations and very significant correlations you get the same effect in older people as younger people and silver it goes on and on from there so that's a demonstration that there's a relation between loneliness and heat seeking physical heat seeking so now you can do experiments you know experiments not correlational studies have people touch the hot coffee or cold or cold iced coffee and then have them complete the you say a loneliness scale which only has a range of 1 to 4 the norm is 2 and if the norm is 2 that means you basically can push it up you know just 2 more points to 4 at most and we almost push it halfway there by just merely touching something cold you increase the usually I mean you say they'll only have scored a 2.8 from 2.0 so feelings of physical coldness are making people feel psychologically cold and that's coming out on the the scale it's supposed to measure the sort of chronic level of their social relationships not the temporary how they feel at the moment this is the best one I think social inclusion exclusion Kip Williams lots of people have used this cyber ball game you know that where you you include people or you are yourself included or you yourself excluded by the group in a ball tossing game on the computer you can also have people remember a time in their past and they weren't picked for the team you know team on the gym and in the gym or the playground times or whatever the rejection experience or exclusion was or an inclusion experience so it works either way what that does in lots of research by say Kip Williams but also Park & Manor and other people is it increases in need for affiliation once you've been excluded you want to affiliate and so if you ask people after an exclusion event how much do you want to be with your friends and her family you know that's significantly more likely to want to do that after an exclusion event on cyber ball ok that's their finding what we did was we we interposed either a warm or cold or neutral physical experience after the exclusion event they either touched or did a product testing on one of these icy hot or cold cold warm or cold packs and then we measured the need for affiliation and what happened was the warm physical experience touching something warm after being excluded removed the need for affiliation so what's happening is the feeling of physical warmth satisfied the need for affiliation its satisfied it made it's like a homeostasis mechanism it restored feelings that this is okay now I had this experience when I was like nine years old I was on a boy's choir believe it or not at a universe ellen:oh actually University of Illinois Boys Choir and I was in the first years we would take your tours around the Midwest at Detroit and other places and the first time we did this they shoved us all like four of us and they're basically strangers this is a choir of like 60 60 boys in two hotel rooms and like we and there was like one bed I mean we're like oh and we didn't want to you know do this and we were like creeped out and like we don't want it you know like that well we all had turns in the bathroom you know take showers and stuff and I remember I was just love wreck I didn't want to do this was uncomfortable and was not pleasant and so forth I can't I was under the hot shower and I was like I felt better and better I actually walked out I was fine we all were fine we all took showers and we got along great pillow fights we just messed around and was worn it we had no problem no problem at all no I always had that remember I never understood but I thought oh you know just relaxing but it's more than that it's not just relaxing and again you know we've known this you know again for years we the elderly people moving in higher proportions in the South like Florida and we always thought that was because of physical warmth and coldness you know but what's going on with older elderly people is that as the older you get the more your social network shrinks your children move away your friends pass away and and your social nets so maybe what's going on here is in part not totally but in part seeking physical heats into the warmth to replace the missing social warmth in in in life I could end there I can talk about these touch ones too which are sort of cute I can do it relatively quickly it's up to you I mean I want to leave time for questions but this gets into the scripts into these things like heavy man and hard physical hard makes you think things are more difficult maybe it's tell you touching something rough and steadily makes you think something was more effortful and didn't go as well as it and the one that I like the best is it's actually the hard and soft if I can get right to it so here think about this so hard as a concept Arden soft as a concept we also talk about negotiations we talk about taking a hard line or being soft on crime and we have those metaphors too and it turns out if you have people sitting on hard chairs around the table with no cushions on them they don't negotiate don't compromise if you have a my price is 10 you offer me five what do I say next I could split the difference 750 that's what people do in the soft chairs I could say a nine and that's what people do in the hard chairs so it's actually hard and soft affects your hard line or your being soft we also have the effect on sentencing for crimes that if you're sitting on soft chairs you think the sentence should not be as much as people who sit on hard chairs so these are effects are everywhere they're through different sensory systems I think I can I can go we've already talked about this the one on goals is the Macbeth that's a good example then the Macbeth effect where the goal is to is to clean your your soul or clean your conscience and and you can satisfy that by cleaning your hands here's basically the the main of the big effect down there in terms of whether you want to help somebody seventy-four percent control condition yes 41 percent F did dramatically different after they've washed their hands been induced to wash their hands essentially what comes next and I could talk about his mechanism because with these for effects if you haven't noticed they're everywhere and there's a new one every day and a new cute kind of metaphor type physical priming effect everyday people now are really focusing underlying mechanisms and what is going on here and and the message right now is that it's not just one mechanism these are multiplied determined there's different mechanisms for different effects some of them are may well be due to semantic priming some may be what hard wire didn't like warm cold and distance is also other ones might be Macbeth that cleansing might also be norbert Schwartz's recent work suggests it also might be hard work or very early learning and for example the heart the hard one I can see that being in that I can see that being not a hard wired but being a semantic effect that that terms like hard have original meanings that then have new original additional meanings accruing on them as we grow older and and learn more senses of the word hard so big like stereotypes go beyond the information given here touching or having a hard experience may also activate the other things going beyond the information given about the other meanings of hard like difficult or hard line so I can see semantic priming be being a viable here for example but we know that there are some that seem to be hardwired and those two are there and for very early learning this is also possible to for example I think the verticality one is a great one for early learning because think about the little kids think about the the infants and small children being so small and and always having to look up to their caretakers for years and years and years and years through childhood they're low-power caretakers high-power looking up to high power is what we do for how many years of our life from zero on and so it very well could be an association that came through the just the physical reality of being a kid being short and small and having to look up all the time to the powerful people above so that's also a viable mechanism that's that is being researched and I really think that's it thank you very much [Applause] yeah for example the smoking you get this effect in need states like they haven't smoked for four hours if they've just smoked that need is off and the goal is not there and you don't get the effect there so definitely and I'm trying to say the difference between this and Skinner for example you know the external environment causing all behavior is that Skinner did not allow those mediating internal systems he did not allow the mechanic to open the hood and look inside the inside the car you had to fix the car without opening the hood we're allowing the mediating processes in these different systems without those we would never get any effects because the effects are different they have different operating characteristics for the different systems different time courses different ways to affect behavior it's not just one size fits all and by any means we never would have found that out if we hadn't understood how these different psychological conscious not up to phenomenal systems worked and that's how we can do what Skinner failed to do Skinner tried to go to higher mental processes and behavior and he failed that's what caused the cut one cause of the cognitive revolution the failure of his 57 book because he tried to take the Rabb and pigeon stuff and say it affects higher mental functions like language and behavior and it just was ridiculous it couldn't SR SR SR SR James and this is not an SR SR change all this is you know actually mediating psychological systems okay who had the question that yes yeah what they're all long-term because for example when you make a judgement it sticks I mean these things may be fleeting at the moment but the things you make and justement you make and behaviors you commit yourself to publicly have lives of their own afterwards you know that you want to be consistent once you do something you sort of are locked in that you did that and it's public so these things do have even though they may be fleeting in the moment do you have long-term consequences especially judgments and impressions impressions have huge consequences first impressions of course for thereafter I'm not sure about the rest of the question Yeah right we'll see privately interesting because these different kinds of priming effects last different of different amounts of time for example the evaluation effect has gone within four seconds it has to because it's a within subject design every four seconds a new trial if it didn't go away be much the first will affect the second it would just mush and you get very good individual you know within subject I want to simplify your point about individual differences though because people in the embodiment area are now coming forward in and and and it's showing that there's I think they've are we already knew this other people already knew this there's a wide individual differences in prio perception in other words sensitivity to these states and so the individual differences now gives an opening to some health implicate to some health possibilities healthcare possibilities so for example it could be that there are deficits in some groups to feeling for example the it could be there's a relation between autism and and this warm the warmth and trust effect it may be that we can get there bypass the problem by using physical warmth for example with the the normal system is not working the usual system is not working but individual differences here could be you know if you're not ever feeling the warmth I mean your your you can see where your life is going to go it's going to be a cold life you know if you can't if it if it's our natural tendency when we're lonely or feeling socially cold to substitute that and feel better and regain homeostasis with physical warmth that's how we normally operate great because we can do that and we'll be okay what about people who can't do that and maybe they try and it doesn't work whatever if they're gonna be the ones who are gonna go down down down down down and not get out of it you know so I think there's a lot of health implications here there's even some possibilities for therapy like homemade you know there's you know cheapo therapy in the in the home with warmth and and there's distance that could be used there's lots of things that could be used it also touches on a another really critical point and that is can you prime yourself can we prime ourself can I get this from teachers all the time can I just prime my kids with achievement and have higher scores and you know if you do it the right way yeah you might work but but can we do it with ourselves it's like the old problem you can't tickle yourself you know you can't tickle yourself because you know it's coming your way what you're doing and that gets in the way in fact an always finding studies when people are aware that they might have been primed you don't get the effect it's only when you're not aware of it but yeah that's that's Jane I see that as James's problem in a way because that's his argument he really wants to say that that conscious states and conscious will guides behavior but not from the impulse and from the control end but I'm not personally buying into that that that argument James really did not believe it unconscious forces at all and he he criticized them as you know tumbling ground for wimzie's back then it was a like a cheap blank slate that you couldn't prove otherwise because no way to get at the unconscious you could just say anything you wanted when James was writing and so he was really resisting saying things were not conscious also he he did talk about the connection and he did but I guess what I'm saying I put James up there to say even James you know said consciousness is for everything and guides everything even James said consciousness consciousness was not formed the impulse to action or the instigation of action okay so even he said that but his gatekeeper thing is his cut his version I mean I'm not you are in excrement where you have to push away things continue and if you put up a picture of it crying the baby so and and you're making them push away so is it that they're gonna be at some intermediate because they there's a positive conscious and then unconscious negative or are they going to start to push quickly but then catch themselves and slow down the middle of a trajectory that could be because there's there's there's actually two types of priming effects there's a similar to than there's contrast contrast were confence Ettore and I'll give you an example the client let's say let's say a little kid is on on your street and sitting on the curb crime now the similar tip thing would say you see that behavior the little boys crying little girls crying and and you you walk over sit down next to me cry too because that would be the natural imitative kind of thing that's not what we do right because we have social norms about we're the big person they're the little person we have responsibility and they need our help in this kind of thing and that kicks in that goal the compensatory goal to help them is what really kicks in it dominates the imitative tendency so you basically can have both operating and you often can get the triggers that are compensatory for example coldness cause people to want to affiliate so priming coldest didn't cause them to not want to be with people they wanted them to restore you know homeostasis to get warms to get back to the zero you know the neutral area so you don't always get a similar to the facts you get you could contrast effects usually when it's a motivation when this is a trigger to a motivational state and not everything is not an initiate we'll see that's what we're saying though he sees really restricting himself the instigation of action no he's had a big hassle on that book he has he's trying to make it really clear he's talking about the illusion of conscious will but his but he says it doesn't I don't think he really says it's not ever causal but he's saying that we can't his point is little more so is that we can't use our introspection about our conscious well-being causal as evidence prima facie even for for its actual causality because he can move that of that feeling around there's attribution all kinds of studies and show that it's due to something else feeling is not a direct readout like what Hume says the same thing we can't have direct access to causality even in our own even in our own self but I forgot the rest of the rest of the question yeah he says it but also but also Baumeister Massa Campos say the same thing I mean really that's the way it even Roy Baumeister of all people I mean is finally moved to that position and talks about what the functions of consciousness are but it is not for the instigation and guidance of action and that's what beggar says - oh god it took me 25 years to get worried at that point I mean yes I I'm giving up I'm over I'm done I can retire I finally got ba Meister say that and I do with almost everything in there found Meister's that Bob Meister of math accomplished like reveal the functions of consciousness I can quibble but I need to where they were 20 years ago to where they are now I mean that's that was the big thing it was said for example lots of models bandura at Locke you know and others I could come up with allsafe's Blissett li that nothing happens without conscious involvement nothing it's a body it's a it's sort of a vestige of the old serial state stage models of information processing where you have to finish one box before you can move to the next box and it was like you had conscious intentions before action you can so bandura says this very often and so do other people and people are still saying it today so they get Baumeister you know to say that know that it looks like from the evidence and nothing about Roy whatever I mean it's just talking to maybe a few people in the room but Roy and I are you know debated in conferences and a lot of people coming in freshmen we don't you don't like each other or we fight or we hate each other that kind of thing and I wonder since the same you know then I learned so much and use I hope to learn for me but we really have been talking to each other and imposing challenges that we'd had to overcome and I've certainly learned from him and apparently he learned from me and other people doing this kind of research that you know the conscious self the agentic self is not the instigator of everything well there aren't no there the paper on the functions of consciousness loudly lays out many several important things for one thing I mentioned early on is for time traveling the one thing that the the system the unconscious system is present oriented just like it always was the consciousness allowed the planet it allowed you know allowed the remembrance of things past to to learn from the states and there's kind of retrieval operations and so this system allows you to do that I mean without this system you couldn't have the other so that's one thing time traveling is one thing it definitely supports and and you know I think when people are going this is a social answer a social psychological answer but tetlock balanced er I mean and he that everyone sort of staying the same kind of thing consciousness is basically for explaining yourself to others which is hugely important it always was ostracism and if you you know if you do something accidentally that hurts your group and you had no way to explain that you didn't need to do it you know you know and the view you know and just kicking you out of the village is enough what are you gonna do yeah [Music] hmm yeah I've written I've written always papers on the same topic you know over and over that we that this is a problem we've got a generation problem which is that we have so many priming effects or so they happen all the time and then the question there is which one will happen which one will affect behavior and that's the reduction problem of all these things happening which one wins which one dominates the other there is some advance there there's a motivational hierarchies for example Kendrick and company have published in the handbook of Social Psychology in other places where you can look at one system was would be expected to dominate the other we already know there an answer to a previous question that the behavioral ones down here the perceptual ones are dominated by the motivational ones that if that a queue to do this you can have a queue to do the same thing as the person needing your help or to help and basically when those are in conflict the the motivation wins in fact motivation wins and trumps everything and the evaluation one that's nice but it's fleeting and small and it's sort of temporary and it get your arms and muscles doing the right thing so it's hardly as powerful as these other two in terms of actually guiding you know the level of complexity of social behavior I mean we're talking and mood when you're dealing with something as simplex is you know getting people to act walk slow like over weekend boy you're definitely doing something conceptual down here and and so those are stronger I'm you know this is about all we know and I'd love to see further research and research in other labs a lot of people ask that question and I used to say well could you do the research and tell me what happens because no one wants to do this those studies and we do the best we can we're also doing all the other stuff you know but I agree it's a very important thing um but it's you know we're chasing the rabbit and you know I guess I don't want to stop chasing the rabbit enough to figure everything out because I just it's just you know we we just stumbled into the coffee stuff you know and then we just it's just so much fun I just want to keep chasing or that I think okay okay Spanish oh that's a good one you thought okay I'll tell you someone's I've been thinking about but that's not one I've been thinking about that's a good one that's a very nice one and you know to amplify the point we get warm for other things besides you know we get kind you know there's other ways to get warm a body warmth and stuff and uh those are very nice very nice things yeah but that's a good one because you do see people who are like you know in that state you know maybe sleeping long or wanting just not getting up and maybe the warmth of of work you know and in fact James talked about that example of being hard to it's hard to get out of a warm bed and how do you do that and that's the example he used so that's interesting you know I'll tell you what I was thinking along those lines like the elderly's one but another one is alcohol and you know there's types of alcohol like beer and wine he's cold you know and ice cold all that great but there's other kinds that you know like a hard liquor bourbon the Scotch aware that if it's really warm and you know fired fiery as it goes down the road I'm thinking well maybe you know there's a relation between loneliness and preference or that kind of alcohol and I'm dissing wild speculations but you know we didn't think it was there with loneliness and substituting warmth there either you know and so as you know from catchy Oprah science article you know loneliness has a library you know anyway and not really catchy open you guys know anyway the loneliness has a lot of health a lot of health implications of negative health implications in consequences so you know we're dealing with something important and there's a huge correlation and you know I think we're onto something and I proposed grants trying to study it and see what happens you know but it's anyway that's a great it's a great question to end on you want one more yeah we're risking we're going to end off good here now Larissa [Music]

Channel: Mizzou

Views: 41,506

Rating: 4.6969695 out of 5

Keywords: Psychology, Distinguished Lecture Series, John Bargh, behavior, Mizzou

Id: pWSC48EUg-8

Length: 81min 33sec (4893 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2011