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Although social comparison is often considered as an automatic process, the evidence in support of this idea is weak and inconclusive. In this paper, we reexamined the question of automaticity in social comparison by testing the hypothesis that subliminal social comparison affects explicit self-evaluations. In two high-powered experiments, young women were subliminally exposed (or not) to a high standard of comparison (media images of ultra-thin women). Next, they made explicit self-evaluations of their body appearance anxiety. Using both between-participants (Experiment 1) and within-participant (Experiment 2) designs, we found converging evidence that subliminal exposure to the thin ideal increases body appearance anxiety in women. Using Bayes factors as measures of evidence, the present experiments provided substantial (Experiment 1) and very strong (Experiment 2) evidence that social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations. The present experiments can be easily replicated using a standardized procedure (replication script) that is publicly available on the Open Science Framework. We discuss how these findings contribute to reestablish confidence in the modern view of social comparison as an automatic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated whether instructions have the potential to generate memory-independent attitude acquisition as indexed by a stochastic model of evaluative conditioning that distinguishes between memory-dependent and memory-independent learning. For that purpose, we instructed participants about pairings of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli without having participants experience them. We obtained a significant contribution of memory-independent learning that depended on whether instructions emphasized the importance of memorization at learning or the importance of feelings at either learning or retrieval. Our findings call for caution when interpreting the memory-independent contribution as an indicator of association formation on the one hand and unaware learning on the other hand. Our research demonstrates the need to clearly distinguish between processes operating at encoding and processes operating at retrieval in empirical and theoretical research on evaluative conditioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies examined whether implementation intentions, self-regulatory “if-then” plans, can alter social projection – people's tendency to automatically assume that other people share their attitudes. In Study 1 ( N = 120), participants provided their attitudes on twenty items (e.g., “I like mechanics magazines”), and then formed either (1) a goal intention directed at reducing projection: “I will remember that other people are different!”, (2) the same goal intention followed by an implementation intention: “If I'm asked to estimate what percent of other people agree with me, then I will remember that other people are different!”, or (3) did not adopt any strategy (no-treatment control). Participants who formed an implementation intention were less likely to estimate that other people share their attitudes than did participants in the goal intention and control conditions. Study 2 ( N = 268) replicated these results and additionally demonstrated that if-then plans can also increase projection. Overall, these findings indicate that if-then plans can be used to both decrease and increase social projection. Importantly, the latter finding is the first demonstration that implementation intentions can be used to intensify an existing automatic process. Thus, by forming implementation intentions, individuals can exercise dynamic control over nonconscious processes, that is, they can down-regulate as well as up-regulate such processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture shapes how we interpret behavior, symbols, customs, and more. Its operation is largely implicit, unnoticed until we encounter other cultures. Therefore deep cultural differences should be most evident in automatic processes for interpreting events, including behavior. In two studies, we compared American and Japanese undergraduates' spontaneous (unintended and unconscious) trait inferences (STIs) from behavior descriptions. Both groups made STIs but Japanese made fewer. More important, estimates of the controlled (C) and automatic (A) components of their recall performance showed no differences on C, but A was greater for Americans. Thus westerners' greater reliance on traits, in intentional and spontaneous impressions, may reflect cultural differences in automatic processes for making and recalling meaning. The advantages of locating cultural differences in automatic processes are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are personality trait concepts merely descriptive of behaviors or do they describe causes? Social psychologists have differing views. Thus we looked at lexical decision response times (RTs) in a list context paradigm, which presents prime–target pairs embedded in lists of different contexts. In lists of associated pairs, traits did not affect RTs to related behaviors. But in lists of causally related pairs, traits primed RTs to behavioral words. Causality was never mentioned, and RTs were short enough to suggest automatic processing. This is consistent with other research on priming thematic relations. It also indicates that traits are implicit causes rather than mere descriptions of behavior, at least among Western participants. This challenges some current formulations in the social psychology of impression formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although mimicry generally facilitates social interaction, sometimes mimicry effects can hamper pursuit of focal goals. Two studies tested whether the self-regulation strategy of forming implementation intentions (i.e., planning in advance the when, where, and how of one's goal striving) can be used to regulate mimicry effects. In Study 1, implementation intentions to be non-prejudiced ensured that mimicking increased attraction even for an unlikable person. In Study 2, implementation intentions to be thrifty reduced participants' susceptibility to the persuasive effects of being mimicked. Mere goal intentions to be non-prejudiced and to be thrifty did not suffice to regulate mimicry effects. We conclude that the strategic automaticity accomplished by implementation intentions allows people to intentionally strengthen (Study 1) and weaken (Study 2) mimicry effects in line with their goals. Implications for the effective self-regulation of mimicry effects are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In two experiments, participants first learned to associate faces with negative, neutral, or positive behaviors and then evaluated morphs of these faces with novel faces. Across both experiments, participants evaluated new (morph) faces that were similar to familiar negative faces more negatively than new (morph) faces that were similar to familiar positive faces. This learning generalization effect was present when participants' judgments of the new (morph) faces were a) based not only on facial appearance but also on relevant behavioral information (Experiment 1); b) made under cognitive load (Experiment 2); and c) made under instructions not to use similarity information (Experiment 2). The findings of the experiments suggest that learning generalization based on facial physical similarity is a powerful and relatively automatic process, which likely influences face evaluation across a range of circumstances. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recent studies showed that people evaluate objects more favorably when these objects are gazed-at by others, an effect coined as “mimetic desire”. In two studies, we tested whether mimetic desire stems from an automatic form of learning by examining one dimension of automaticity, i.e., people''s awareness of the object-gaze association. Participants saw 6 neutral art paintings associated with a female gazing toward two of the paintings, away from two of the paintings, and closing her eyes with respect to the last two paintings. After the exposition phase, participants evaluated the paintings and performed a contingency-awareness test. Importantly, participants'' responses on this test were genuinely driven by memory and not by inferences from liking. Results show that participants preferred objects that were gazed-at but only when they were aware of the object-gaze association. Hence, despite the adaptive function of joint attention, its impact on valence acquisition does not seem to qualify as an implicit learning process. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Culture affects the extent to which people focus on other people or on the situation in drawing inferences. Building on recent research showing that perceptions of others and situations can mediate prime-to-behavior effects, we tested whether culture would modify both the mechanism and the outcome of primed constructs on behavior. Easterners and Westerners were primed with competitiveness or cooperativeness before playing a social dilemma game with an ambiguously or unambiguously competitive player. Results indicated that the primes had different effects on the social dilemma decisions of Easterners and Westerners and that these effects were due to the different consequences the primes had for Easterners'' and Westerners'' perceptions of the other player and construals of the situation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Two experiments examine nonconscious processes that facilitate pursuing egalitarian goals. It was hypothesized that when working on a task not known to be relevant to egalitarian goals there is heightened ability to detect opportunities to goal pursuit (goal-relevant people) embedded in the task, even when they are best ignored for optimal performance. Further, this selective attention should cease when the goal is sated, despite increased semantic accessibility of these opportunities that results from satiation. Experiment one introduced egalitarian goals via writing an essay about failing to be egalitarian to Black men. Next, an ostensibly unrelated task presented Black and White men in an array of faces as distracters to a focal task. Task performance was disrupted only by arrays containing Black men, and only among participants primed with egalitarian goals. This was not due to increased semantic accessibility of the concept “Black men.” Experiment two had all participants write failure essays and then write second essays. Half wrote affirming essays about egalitarianism and Black men. Despite this increased semantic accessibility of the group “Black men,” distracted attention was not evidenced. Instead, the goal had been satisfied and goal pursuit shut down. In contrast, the remaining participants wrote affirming essays in an irrelevant domain. Despite the decreased semantic accessibility, goal accessibility remained and was evidenced by selective attention to Black men. These findings reveal Black men are associated not with stereotypes, but egalitarian goals. They also point to the role goal completion versus self affirmation play in goal pursuit. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: People make a variety of automatic inferences when observing others'' actions. These include inferences about stable dispositions as well as transitory goal states and social situations. However, models of social inference have rarely considered whether different types of automatic inferences can co-occur. We present three experiments in which participants were incidentally exposed to texts depicting behaviors that afforded inferences about actors'' traits and the social situations these actors were experiencing. Results from lexical decision and probe-recognition tasks revealed heightened activation of both trait and situational inferences; furthermore, this co-occurring activation was spontaneous, unconscious, and independent of processing resources or specific impression-formation goals. A fourth experiment extended these findings by showing that when participants were asked to make deliberate attributional judgments of the same set of behaviors, typical goal-directed biases reflecting the selection of either trait or situational interpretations emerged. Implications for social inference processes are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Individuals display high levels of trust and express feelings of safety when interacting with social ingroup members. Here, we investigated whether cues related to ingroup membership would change perceptions of the safety of alcohol. Participants were exposed to images of beer in either a standard can or a can featuring the colors of their university (i.e., ‘fan cans’). We hypothesized that exposure to fan cans would change perceptions of the risks of beer drinking. Results showed that participants exposed to fan cans rated beer consumption as less dangerous (Experiment 1), were more likely to automatically activate safety-related mental content after unconscious perception of beer cues (Experiment 2), and viewed their ingroup''s party practices as less dangerous (Experiment 3). These results provide evidence that ingroup-associated colors can serve as a safety cue for alcohol, which may in theory perpetuate alcohol-related risk-taking, already a cause for concern on college and university campuses. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]