Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice

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Abstract

Inspired by potential theoretical linkages between nonconscious priming work in psychology and the anthropological emphasis on the impact of material culture, five studies were conducted to investigate the role of implicitly presented material objects and automatic processes in interpersonal and organizational contexts. These studies showed that exposure to objects common to the domain of business (e.g., boardroom tables and briefcases) increased the cognitive accessibility of the construct of competition (Study 1), the likelihood that an ambiguous social interaction would be perceived as less cooperative (Study 2), and the amount of money that participants proposed to retain for themselves in the “Ultimatum Game” (Studies 3 and 4). A fifth study, in which the ambiguity of the governing social situation was manipulated, demonstrated that these types of effects are most likely to occur in contexts that are ambiguous and/or lacking in explicit normative demands. The importance of these situation-specific “material priming” effects (all of which occurred without the participants' awareness of the relevant influence) to judgment and behavioral choice in specific contexts, as well as to the fostering of less competitive organizational settings, is discussed.

Introduction

Certain material objects are predictably associated with particular social contexts: Books and journals are often found in an academic's office; dark lights, candles, and flowers are often found in a romantic French restaurant; and, of particular relevance to the present thesis, briefcases, suits, and board-room tables are often found at business meetings. These objects or “props” can play an important role in creating distinctive situational contexts and communicating associated behavioral norms. Anthropologists have long pointed out that material objects are signs fraught with meaning as to cultural norms and values (De Saussure, 1915). A few psychologists have similarly emphasized the directive and dynamic role played by objects and other ecological features (notably Barker & Wright, 1955; also see Gibson, 1979). However, whereas most behavioral social scientists and particularly most social psychologists—even in discussing the interplay between the “person and the situation” (Ross & Nisbett, 1991)—have devoted careful empirical attention to the impact that other individuals can exert on behavioral choice within a specific social situation, relatively little attention has been paid to the potential impact of the objects that characteristically are present in these social contexts.

In the present research, we explore the possibility that the mere presence of everyday, inanimate objects can serve as “material primes” that exert automatic, unconscious, and even unwanted effects on relevant behavioral choices and judgments. In particular, we investigate the potential for objects drawn from the world of business—with their strong associations to competitive and self-interested norms (see Kay & Ross, 2003; Liberman, Samuels, & Ross, in press)—to automatically influence social perceptions and judgments in a predictable, unconscious, and often counter-productive manner.

A quarter-century of implicit priming research leaves little doubt that subtle, even subliminal, environmental stimuli can influence social perceptions, decision processes, and, to at least some extent, behavior as well (e.g., see Baldwin, Carrell, & Lopez, 1990; Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Trötschel, 2001; Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977). In particular, semantic primes and primes involving names and images of other people have been shown to affect perceptions of others (e.g., Higgins, 1996), construals of the normative demands of social situations (e.g., Baldwin & Holmes, 1987; Kay & Ross, 2003), interpersonal processes (Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003) and even motivated behaviors (Bargh et al., 2001). However, despite the abundance of research on priming effects and related implicit processes (for a review, see Higgins, 1996), the extent to which potential sources of such priming include physical objects drawn from relevant social situations remains unclear.

Two reasons for this lacuna in the available body of priming research can be noted. First, researchers in this area historically have been more interested in studying the consequences of variations in cognitive accessibility accomplished by priming than in studying the range of circumstances that might influence such accessibility in everyday circumstances (for an exception see Higgins & King, 1981). Second, the emphasis in the majority of this work has been on documenting the existence and nature of implicitly generated thoughts and behaviors rather than on understanding the everyday circumstances in which they might actually manifest themselves (but see Bargh, Raymond, Pryor, & Strack, 1995). Accordingly, most research has relied upon either semantic primes that are unambiguously and simply linked to the constructs they were introduced to activate (see Higgins, 1996), and/or animate primes that serve to activate clear prototypes or stereotypes of particular classes of actors (e.g., Baldwin et al., 1990; Payne, 2001).

Some researchers, to be sure, have used non-social objects as part of their investigations. Most notable in this regard, perhaps, was Berkowitz's (1968) seminal demonstration that aggression, especially among already angry college students, becomes more intense following casual exposure to a gun. Yet very few investigators have focused directly on the nonconscious role that mundane inanimate objects—that is, objects that are both very common and relatively subtle—can play in directing everyday interpersonal judgments and perceptions, especially those judgments and perceptions that occur in regular social contexts (such as business settings) in which the objects in question are commonly embedded. As Williams and Costall (2000) reflected,

Psychology appears to have special problems with objects. To the limited extent that psychology even touches upon things, they have been regarded as existing primarily in a physical, asocial realm, as distinct from the socio-cultural domain of people (p. 97).

The lack of interest in material objects and their influence displayed by most social psychologists stands in sharp contrast to the emphases of social anthropologists—especially those who label themselves “material anthropologists.” In fact, these social scientists make material objects their unit of analysis in attempting to understand the beliefs, ideas, and values of a given society at a given time (Dittmar, 1992). Implicit in this method of study is the belief that material objects hold representations and meaning beyond their physical shapes and functions (see Miller, 1998), that “things, both natural and man-made, are appropriated into human culture in such a way that they represent the social relations of culture, standing in for other human beings, carrying values, ideas, and emotions (Dant, 1999, p. 11).” Over time, cultures and societies are thought to imbue inanimate objects with implicit meanings—meanings that can become very salient in the collective consciousness of a given society (e.g., Graves-Brown, 2000; McCracken, 1987; Miller, 1998). Such objects, moreover, are thought to serve as conveyors of ritualized behavior, helping those who share a material culture to know how to behave “appropriately” in a given context. In other words, familiar objects and the meaning systems they activate may help to define and disambiguate potentially ambiguous situations, thereby providing people both with common psychological interpretations and with overlapping behavioral inclinations (see Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

The social cognition tradition in social psychology adds an important notion to this anthropological account—the notion that social beings are generally “cognitive misers” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). It is asserted that people generally prefer to respond to situations in a cognitively effortless fashion, devoting attentional, and analytic resources to controlled, deliberative, processing of information, and decision-making only reluctantly, and only when it is clearly necessary to do so (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Baumeister & Sommer, 1997). It seems likely, then, that it will be in novel or ambiguous social situations—in which people do not already possess a clearly established cognitive script and therefore need to rely upon other means of preserving cognitive resources—that judgments and perceptions are most likely to be affected by environmental material cues.

Considered in conjunction, these anthropological and social psychological traditions suggest a testable prediction. Given that semantic primes and person primes have been shown to exert effects on perceptions and behavioral choice via increasing the accessibility of relevant and applicable cognitive constructs (see Higgins, 1996; Srull & Wyer, 1979), it is reasonable to predict that nonconscious exposure to objects that manipulate construct accessibility should produce similar influences on relevant choices and perceptions. That is, if certain inanimate objects (such as those drawn from business contexts) come to assume implicit psychological meanings (such as competitiveness), then when embedded in ambiguous and/or novel situations, exposure to such objects may (without the individual's conscious awareness) produce the following: (1) increases in the cognitive accessibility of constructs related to those object-generated meaning systems, (2) corresponding changes in the perception or disambiguation of relevant social contexts, and (3) corresponding changes in observed decisions and behavioral choices.

Through the use of objects and images from the business domain in demonstrating the feasibility of such a process, we hope, in broadest terms, to increase our understanding of the manner in which people and their physical environments interact. More specifically, we hope: (1) to demonstrate the ecological validity and potential real-world significance of earlier research on automatic behavior and nonconscious priming (see Bargh et al., 1996; Chen, Lee-Chai, & Bargh, 2001; Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003; Higgins, 1996), and (2) to contribute to ongoing discussions about the (potentially destructive) consequences of competitive orientations during negotiation (Forgas, 1998; Maxwell, Nye, & Maxwell, 1999; Pruitt & Carnevale, 1993).

Before proceeding to the details of the research, however, it is worth briefly addressing why the preceding analysis should be applicable to objects drawn from (and behaviors relevant to) organizational and business settings. First, given the relatively strong competitive and capitalistic stereotypes surrounding the business world, we reasoned that objects drawn from this context are likely to possess particularly robust and powerful connotations. Indeed, previous research offers some evidence that such associations exist. For example, Kay and Ross (2003) demonstrated that priming participants with words related to the construct of competition led participants to rate the “Wall Street Game” as a significantly more appropriate name than the “Community Game” for the relevant mixed-motive dilemma (also see Liberman et al., in press).

Second, automatic and implicit psychological processes are likely to be of considerable relevance to the routinized and fast-paced atmosphere in which business interactions take place. Indeed, several researchers are beginning to pay increasing attention to automatic cognitive processes and implicit primes that exert influence in the context of bargaining and/or negotiation (for a review, see Bazerman, Curhan, Moore, & Valley, 2000; Neale, 1984). Increases in the salience and cognitive accessibility of gender stereotypes, for example, have been shown to have dramatic effects on the extent to which women conform to, versus react against, their “stereotypical” negotiation styles (Kray, Thompson, & Galinsky, 2001). Similarly, semantically priming the construct of fairness has been shown to produce significant changes in price negotiations, leading participants to engage in more cooperative bargaining strategies (Maxwell et al., 1999).

The empirical goals of the studies to be reported can be summarized as follows: By employing as stimuli common material objects from the business world—i.e., objects such as briefcases, boardroom tables, and fountain pens (or images of such objects)—we sought to accomplish four goals. First, we sought, in Study 1, to demonstrate that seemingly chance exposure to inanimate objects, or even the pictorial representation of those objects, can in fact increase the cognitive accessibility of the particular knowledge structures that are associated with those objects. We then sought, in studies 2, 3, and 4, to demonstrate that exposure to such images, or to the objects themselves, can also produce relevant changes in social and business-relevant perceptions and behavioral choices. Finally, in Study 5, through manipulating the explicitness of the normative demands surrounding the context in which these behavioral judgments are made, we sought to provide initial evidence that material primes are most likely to affect behavioral choices when normative demands are least explicit (or, conversely, most ambiguous).

Section snippets

Study 1

Our first study was designed to demonstrate that pictorial representations of everyday material objects, such as those linked to business situations, can automatically increase the cognitive accessibility of the norms and other concepts associated with those situations—in this case the norm and concept of competition in particular and other aspects of self-interested behavioral choices in general. To do this, we first exposed participants to pictures and descriptions of either business-related

Study 2

Our earlier conceptual analysis suggests that objects in one's environment may serve to implicitly communicate meanings and norms when a situation is novel or ambiguous, thereby providing a guide to one's behavior in absence of any conscious deliberation or other expenditure of cognitive resources. Study 2 pursued this conjecture by first priming participants through use of the same matching task used in Study 1. In this study, however, the second, ostensively unrelated task participants

Study 3

Our third study was designed to assess the impact of business-relevant material primes on response choices made by participants in the “Ultimatum Game”—an interaction context that obliges one participant to propose a division of money that a second participant can either accept or reject (see Guth, Scmittberger, & Schwarz, 1982; Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997; Robert & Carnevale, 1997; Thaler, 1988). The dilemma facing the ultimatum giver is normally analyzed in strategic terms—that is,

Participants

A total of 24 participants participated in exchange for $10 payment. (In order to preserve the ecological-validity of the bargaining exercise, all the participants signed-up believing they were to be paid “up to $10,” but all were actually paid the full $10.)

Procedure

Participants were scheduled on the half hour and instructed to report to a specific room. Once seated, they were told they would be partaking in several different experiments, the first set of which they would perform in the room they were

Study 5

A central function of material primes, we have reasoned, is to aid in the disambiguation of social situations, and to help minimize the cognitive resources that must be expended in discerning operative norms that facilitate social coordination. Implicit in this argument, is that material primes will be most relied upon, even if non-consciously, in situations where such norms and expectations are relatively ambiguous. This contention, we note, is consistent with findings from the priming and

General discussion

Research on the effects of implicit priming conducted by investigators in the social cognitive and social psychological traditions (e.g., Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Higgins, 1996) and work in anthropology on the importance of material culture (see Dant, 1999; Miller, 1998) prompted the present studies on the effects of implicit material priming. The studies focused on the impact of such images and objects on the cognitive accessibility of associated concepts or meaning systems, and on assessments

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    This research was supported in part by Grants MH-44321 and MH-60767 from the US National Institute of Mental Health to L. Ross and J. Bargh, respectively. We thank Grainne Fitzsimons, Hazel Markus, and the members of Lee Ross's and Mark Lepper's lab groups for their helpful advice and comments on this research. We are also especially thankful to Kieran O'Connor for his help with data collection.

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