|
John A. Bargh is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation Laboratory. Bargh’s work focuses on automaticity and unconscious processing as a method to better understand social behavior, as well as philosophical topics such as free will. Much of Bargh's work investigates whether behaviors thought to be under volitional control may result from automatic interpretations of and reactions to external stimuli, such as words. Bargh is particularly famous for his demonstrations of priming which affects action. One of the most well-known of these studies reported that reading words related to elderliness caused subjects to walk more slowly when they exited the laboratory compared to subjects who read words that were not related to the elderly. Though cited over 2000 times, controversy has emerged because several recent studies failed to replicate the finding. In 2013 and 2014, additional reports began to emerge of failures to replicate various findings of Bargh's. These included "social distance priming" and "achievement goal priming" and lonely people's preferences for hot baths.However, there are also successful replications of the association between loneliness and bathing habits, indicating the role of cultural differences.
|
