What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious

European Journal of Social PsychologyEur. J. Soc. Psychol. 36, 147–168 (2006)Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.336Agenda 2006What have we been priming all these years?On the development, mechanisms, and ecology ofnonconscious social behavior*JOHN A. BARGHYale University, USAAbstractPriming or nonconscious activation of social knowledge structures has produced a plethora of ratheramazing findings over the past 25 years: priming a single social concept such as aggressive can havemultipleeffectsacrossawidearrayofpsychologicalsystems,suchasperception,motivation,behavior,and evaluation. But we may have reached childhood’s end, so to speak, and need now to move on toresearchquestionssuchashowthesemultipleeffectsofsingleprimesoccur(thegenerationproblem);next, how these multiple simultaneous priming influences in the environment get distilled intononconscious social action that has to happen serially, in real time (the reduction problem). It issuggested that models of complex conceptual structures (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), language use inreal-life conversational settings (Clark, 1996), andspeech production (Dell, 1986) might hold the keyforsolvingthesetwoimportant‘second-generation’researchproblems.Copyright#2006JohnWiley& Sons, Ltd.Priming effects are ubiquitous in the social psychological literature these days. Nearly all forms ofsocial representation can be primed,it seems—activated incidentallyor ...