John A. Bargh (/ˈbɑːrdʒ/; born 1955) is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory.
Bargh's work focuses on automaticity and unconscious processing as a method to better understand social behavior, as well as philosophical topics such as free will.
Much of Bargh's work investigates whether behaviors thought to be under volitional control may result from automatic interpretations of and reactions to external stimuli, such as words.
Bargh's research has played a pivotal role in our understanding of how subtle, even unconscious cues can influence our actions.
Bargh was influenced by the work of his Ph.D. advisor at the University of Michigan, Robert Zajonc, who concentrated on the fundamental processes underlying behavior, including an emphasis on affect and cognition.
Bargh's concentration on the influence of unconscious and automatic behavior and cognition grows from a fundamental interest in the construct of 'free will.'
Bargh and Pietromonaco's findings[10] have been further supported by a meta-analysis conducted by Herring et al. (2013), which demonstrated the pervasiveness of automatic evaluation effects across a wide range of stimuli.
In an examination of the generality of the effects of this paradigm, Bargh, Chaiken, Govender and Pratto[14] show that simply seeing or hearing mention of stimuli triggers automatically activated evaluations.
[20] Subjects perform a task in which they work closely with a confederate that is trained to repeatedly engage in one of two behaviors: rubbing his or her face or jiggling a knee.
[24] Bargh suggests that unconscious goals are pursued flexibly, and automatically adapt to changing environments during tasks in the experiment.
The physical properties of objects that subjects are touching can similarly influence social impression formation and decision-making.
Correlation studies show that participants rated highly on a loneliness scale, also tend to take longer showers at higher water temperatures.
In a follow-up study, a manipulation of physical warmth to make the subjects colder resulted in an increase on the loneliness scale.
They suggest that only our inability to recognize the powerful activity occurring outside of awareness leads some to believe that they are the masters of their choices.
[45] Moreover, Ramscar et al. (2015) conducted a detailed quantitative analysis of Bargh et al.'s methods and materials, showing that both direct and conceptual replication attempts of many priming effects can be expected to fail over time, between languages, or across different age groups, simply because the learned behaviors that these studies seek to prime do not exhibit the invariance that typically supports direct replication in other areas of science.
They argue that the dynamics of learning, as well as related cultural and linguistic changes, present serious challenges to the scientific study of priming, yet these factors are often overlooked by researchers.
[46] Bargh too has argued that priming effects can be sensitive to contextual factors and moderators, and that replication attempts should carefully consider these issues.
[7] Critics have raised concerns about the replicability of priming studies more broadly, citing issues like publication bias and questionable research practices.
[49] However, methods for assessing and correcting for publication bias (e.g., trim-and-fill, p-curve analysis) have generally indicated that behavioral priming effects remain significant even after accounting for these issues.
[50] Ongoing debates have highlighted the need for well-powered, preregistered studies and direct replications to clarify the boundary conditions of priming effects.