John A. Bargh

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John A. Bargh (born January 9, 1955 in Champaign (Illinois) , USA) is an American psychologist. His experiment on unconsciously influencing behavior through priming from 1996 immediately entered the list of classical experiments in psychology . His work has had a major impact on the free will discussion . He himself says: “'Free will' is a religious term; it is not a scientific term. "

Life

Bargh studied psychology up to a bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois and moved to the University of Michigan for his postgraduate studies , where he earned his doctorate with Robert Zajonc in 1981. His doctoral thesis was awarded by the Society for Experimental Social Psychology . In the same year he became an assistant professor at New York University , where he remained for 22 years. Today he works at Yale University , where he founded the laboratory Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME).

Experiment on the "Florida Effect"

The test subjects should first form sentences from four out of five given words, for example from “finds, he, it, yellow, instantly” the sentence “he finds it instantly”. Then they should go to another room at the end of a corridor for a second assignment. The experiment was actually about measuring how long the test subjects needed to walk. One half of the subjects, the experimental group had received word lists that include the words Florida, forgetful, balding, gray or fold contained, so words with old people associated are. This group walked significantly more slowly than the control group , i.e. just reading certain words influenced the behavior of the test subjects without them noticing anything. They believed their behavior was under their conscious control.

Thomas Mussweiler was able to show that the effect also works in reverse . His subjects were asked to walk slowly for five minutes. Then they were better able to identify words that are associated with old people than the control group.

The Florida effect could not be reproduced in a 2011 study, which led to controversy over the detectability of priming .

Awards

Fonts

  • E. Morsella, JA Bargh, PM Gollwitzer: Oxford handbook of human action. Oxford University Press, New York 2009.
  • R. Hassin, J. Uleman, J. Bargh (Eds.): The new unconscious. Oxford University Press, New York 2005.
  • PM Gollwitzer, JA Bargh (Ed.): The psychology of action: Linking motivation and cognition to behavior. Guilford Publications, New York 1996.
  • JS Uleman, JA Bargh (Ed.): Unintended thought. Guilford Publications, New York 1989.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Daniel Kahneman : Thinking, fast and slow. Allen Lane Paperback, 2011, ISBN 978-1-84614-606-0 , p. 53.
  2. ↑ in the original: “Free will is a religious concept; it's not a scientific concept. "Lecture at the Symposium of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2009 in Tampa, Florida.
  3. ↑ Thomas Mussweiler: Doing Is for Thinking! Stereotype Activation by Stereotypic Movements. In: Psychological Science. 17, 2006, pp. 17-21.
  4. ↑ Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, Axel Cleeremans: Behavioral Priming: It's all in the mind, but whose mind? In: PLoS ONE. 7 (1), January 18, 2012, p. E29081. doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0029081 (English)
  5. ^ Ed Yong: Replication studies: Bad copy. In: Nature. 485, May 17, 2012, pp. 298-300. doi: 10.1038 / 485298a (English)
personal data
SURNAME Bargh, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychologist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Champaign (Illinois) , USA