Review
Feature Review
Automaticity in social-cognitive processes

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Over the past several years, the concept of automaticity of higher cognitive processes has permeated nearly all domains of psychological research. In this review, we highlight insights arising from studies in decision-making, moral judgments, close relationships, emotional processes, face perception and social judgment, motivation and goal pursuit, conformity and behavioral contagion, embodied cognition, and the emergence of higher-level automatic processes in early childhood. Taken together, recent work in these domains demonstrates that automaticity does not result exclusively from a process of skill acquisition (in which a process always begins as a conscious and deliberate one, becoming capable of automatic operation only with frequent use) – there are evolved substrates and early childhood learning mechanisms involved as well.

Section snippets

The pervasive role of automaticity in psychological theory and research

If there is one major trend in research on automaticity of the higher mental processes over the past few years, it is that the concept has now permeated nearly all psychological domains. What began 30 years ago with some tentative steps into the notion that some basic social-perceptual processes, such as impression formation and stereotyping, could have efficient and unintentional components (that is, influences that operate outside of one's conscious awareness) [1], has now become a staple and

Behavior contagion and conformity

Past research on the automatic link between social perception and behavior established that the mere perception of the physical behavior of others [6], as well as the automatic activation of the more abstract category memberships (e.g., racial, gender, role-related) that occurs passively in the course of person perception, results in increased tendencies to behave in the same way oneself (i.e., the ‘perception-behavior link’; [7]). In this way, the same stimuli that in the normal course of

Interim summary

Recent research on preconscious forms of automatic influence have validated and extended previous demonstrations of direct environmental effects on social perception, social behavior, and motivation and goal pursuits. The older lines of research have become more refined and nuanced, with consistent and converging evidence of important mediators and moderators, such as the role of the active self-concept in producing behavior priming effects. Underlying mechanisms, such as the role played by

Goal-dependent automaticity

Goal-dependent or postconscious automaticity (see [1]) concerns skills and efficient thought processes that require the goal or intention to engage in them, but, once put in motion, operate very well with minimal attentional guidance. Motor skills, such as those involved in driving a car or typing a manuscript, can operate, after considerable practice, almost entirely without conscious guidance, but they do not occur without the initial conscious intention to engage in them. Recently, the idea

Concluding remarks

The concept of automaticity has attained a status commensurate with conscious or controlled information processing, such that both forms of processing now receive research scrutiny and incorporation into models of nearly all psychological phenomena (Box 1). Across the various research domains reviewed above, two main developments have taken place over the past 5 years or so. First, no longer is automaticity assumed to result exclusively from a process of skill acquisition, in which a process

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