in Behavior Priming Chris Loersch University of Missouri B. Keith Payne University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Transcription

1 MISATTRIBUTION AND PRIMING LOERSCH AND PAYNE Social Cognition, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2012, pp On Mental Contamination: The Role of (Mis)Attribution in Behavior Priming Chris Loersch University of Missouri B. Keith Payne University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Although source monitoring is an essential function of cognition, we often mistakenly identify the source of accessible information. This misattribution process can account for the influence of mood on judgment and has recently been proposed as a possible mechanism underlying the effect of conceptual primes on behavior. We provide evidence that attributional processes can indeed modulate the impact of primes on behavior. In two studies, primes were more likely to impact behavior when participants misattributed prime-related content to their own thoughts. When attributing this same content to an external source, the primes had no effect. This was true even with the use of subliminal primes, and for reflective and reflexive forms of behavior. Many of us have the impression that we regularly choose how to behave, consciously selecting the actions which move us through our lives. Yet a growing body of evidence calls this seemingly obvious intuition into question. Research has shown that actions can be set in motion by the mere perception of stimuli that are associated with behaviors. For instance, presenting words related to aggression can lead people to behave more aggressively (e.g., Carver, Ganellen, Froming, & Chambers, 1983; Chen & Bargh, 1997). When asked about the reasons underlying such behavior, people are generally unaware of the external influence (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000) and instead generate whatever causal explanations seem most appropriate (Bar-Anan, Wilson, & Hassin, 2010). Chris Loersch, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri; B. Keith Payne, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We thank Ruud Custers, Russ Fazio, Ken Fujita, Val Jefferis, Chris Jones, Rich Petty, and OSU s GAP and SCRG research groups for their valuable feedback on this work. Correspondence should be addressed to Chris Loersch, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, 210 McAlester Hall, Columbia, MO loerschc@missouri.edu Guilford Publications, Inc. 241

2 242 loersch AND PAYNE Such effects are often explained by the ideomotor model (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001), which suggests that behavior priming occurs because of a direct link between the areas of the brain involved in behavior perception and behavior production. This link allows perception of any stimulus associated with prior behavior (i.e., a prime) to immediately activate a related behavioral representation in memory. Although much work supports this perspective (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Rizzolatti, Sinigaglia, & Anderson, 2007), other research has suggested that it may not account for all relevant findings. For instance, the documentation of behavioral contrast (such as behaving less intelligently after thinking of an intelligent person; Dijksterhuis et al., 1998) and the identification of both situational moderators (e.g., Cesario, Plaks, Hagiwara, Navarrete, & Higgins, 2010; Jefferis & Fazio, 2008; Macrae & Johnston, 1998) and dispositional moderators (e.g., Cesario, Plaks, & Higgins, 2006; DeMarree, Wheeler, & Petty, 2005; Smeesters, Wheeler, & Kay, 2009) fit less cleanly in the ideomotor framework. Because of findings like these, investigators have recently begun proposing new mechanisms to explain the wide variety of effects that primes may have on behavior. Informed by prior work on the influence of affect and arousal on judgment, some of these perspectives have suggested that an attribution-based mechanism may underlie some portion of behavioral priming effects. For example, the activeself account (Wheeler, DeMarree, & Petty, 2007) proposes that primes sometimes affect behavior by changing the currently active self-concept. Because the full selfconcept is complex and ambiguous, people may confuse the information made accessible by a prime for actual information about the self. When this misattribution occurs, the content is incorporated into the active self-concept and guides judgment and behavior accordingly. The situated inference model (Loersch & Payne, 2011) also proposes a misattribution-based mechanism for many priming effects. According to this more general perspective, primes bias responses whenever individuals misattribute the mental content made accessible by priming to their own thoughts. The meaning of the thoughts depends on the affordances of the situation. For example, if a person is deciding how to behave after being annoyed, primed information related to hostility may, under some conditions, be misattributed to their own thoughts about how to behave. The result would be increased hostility. Although novel in the area of behavior priming, such ideas have a strong continuity with explanations of affective influences on judgment (cf. Schwarz & Clore, 2003). Just as affect misattributions can drive the effects of mood on judgments, recent models suggest that conceptual misattributions can mediate effects of primes on behavior. The Current Work Although these recent models of behavior priming have proposed misattributionbased mechanisms, there is no direct empirical evidence that attributional processes modulate these priming effects. Our goal is to bridge this gap in the literature. In what follows, we provide two experiments testing the idea that behavioral priming effects can be both produced and eliminated by manipulations which affect the likelihood that prime-related content will be misattributed to participants thoughts. In order to examine the operation of this proposed conceptual misat-

3 MISATTRIBUTION AND PRIMING 243 tribution mechanism, we developed a novel priming procedure which allowed us to manipulate both the behavioral primes participants were exposed to and their attributions for the source of any accessible information. Across experiments we demonstrate that primes are most likely to affect behavior when misattribution is encouraged, and least likely when participants are led to attribute accessible information to external sources. Experiment 1 In this experiment, participants were subliminally primed with either profit or equity related stimuli during our novel priming task. Half of the participants were led to attribute any thoughts that occurred during this task to their own internal thoughts about the situation, thereby encouraging misattribution of primed concepts. The other half were instead led to attribute their thoughts to an external feature of the experimental procedure, discouraging the misattribution process. We then measured the behavioral effects of the primes by examining how much money participants made during an ultimatum game. We hypothesized that the information made accessible by the subliminal primes would be more likely to affect behavior if participants misattributed it to their own internal thought process. Participants primed with profit should then make more money during the ultimatum game than those primed with equity. If this content became attributed to an external source, then the same primes should have no effect. Method Participants One hundred and one participants were randomly assigned to a 2 (prime: profit vs. equity) X 2 (thought attribution: internal source vs. external source) factorial, between-subjects design. Nine non-native English speakers were eliminated from the analyses, leaving a sample of 92 individuals in the final analyses. Materials and Procedure Priming Task. Based on a modified version of the paradigm implemented by Wegner, Schneider, Carter, and White (1987), participants were asked to suppress all thoughts while staring at a fixation point on the computer screen. During the task they were subliminally primed with the construct of either profit or equity. Primes were presented in the center of the screen for 17 ms and were immediately followed by a non-word letter string (e.g., qpwnzmnvcz) to mask the stimuli. This mask remained on screen for 30, 45, or 60 ms (randomly selected for each trial). The profit primes were profit, gain, beat, collect, compete, guard, hoard, keep, stockpile, and win. The equity primes were cooperate, divide, equality, fair, generous, give, help, kind, share, and split. Each prime was shown nine times during the course of the thought suppression task, resulting in 90 separate priming trials. Stimuli were displayed using a 60 Hz refresh rate and were presented using the DirectRT software package.

4 244 loersch AND PAYNE Thought Attribution. In addition to the priming stimuli, participants were also presented with random letter and number strings of varying color, size, and duration ( ms) 90 times throughout the thought suppression task. These stimuli were shown in the center of the screen and presentation size, color, and duration changed rapidly in order to provide a cover story for the thought attribution manipulation. In the internal source condition, participants were told that the stimuli were being presented in order to distract them and interrupt any thoughts that were beginning to form. Based on Kelley s (1971) augmenting rule of attribution, we expected that any information accessible after the task should be especially likely to be misattributed to participants own thoughts because it was in mind despite the interference of our experimental procedure. In the external source condition, participants were instead told that subliminal information embedded within the stimuli would actually cause them to have certain thoughts, making the suppression task much more difficult. Based on Kelley s discounting rule of attribution, we expected that this manipulation would make primed thoughts seem especially unlikely to be self-generated, thereby preventing misattribution to one s own thoughts. Behavioral Measure. After the thought suppression task, participants completed an ultimatum game (Thaler, 1988). This economic decision-making game is structured such that participants receive a monetary offer from a partner which represents some portion (e.g., $3) of a total monetary stake (e.g., $10). If participants accept this offer, they receive the proposed amount ($3) and the person making the proposal keeps the remainder ($7). If participants reject the offer, neither party receives any money. For our purposes, the critical aspect of the ultimatum game is that it contrasts self-interests with prosocial equity concerns and is especially sensitive to manipulations which encourage selection of one strategy over the other (Thomas, 1973). That is, individuals who wish to maximize their profit should generally accept any offered amount when considering proposals, and should offer as little as possible (while still encouraging an acceptance) when proposing to another person (Rubinstein, 1982). In contrast, people focused on equity concerns will instead make fair proposals and will reject unfair offers, behavior which sacrifices immediate personal profit for the sake of reinforcing ideas of fairness and interpersonal equity (Roth, 1995; Thaler, 1988). In our experiment, individuals played the ultimatum game on a computer but were asked to imagine that they were playing with a real person for actual money. Thus, all participants knew that the game was a simulation and had no actual monetary consequences. During the game, individuals received three proposals from their computerized partner (with stakes of $3 out of $10, $2 out of $10, and $5 out of $10, respectively) followed by a role-switch in which participants made their own offer. The computer always accepted. Participants were not given advanced warning regarding the number of rounds or the role-switch. Funnel Debriefing. After this measure participants completed a funnel debriefing to probe for suspicion (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000) and were debriefed. They were asked the following five questions: (1) Did anything about the experiment seem strange or suspicious to you? If yes: what was strange or suspicious? ; (2) Do you think that the different parts of the experiment were related in a way other than that explained earlier in the session? If yes: how were they related? ; (3) Was there anything strange or suspicious about the thought suppression task you completed during the first part of the

5 MISATTRIBUTION AND PRIMING 245 Figure 1. Ultimatum game profits in Experiment 1 as a function of subliminal prime and thought attribution (error bars represent +/- 1 standard error) experiment? If yes: what was it? ; (4) Do you feel that the thought suppression task influenced your performance on any other part of the experiment? If yes: how did it influence you? ; (5) Did you see any actual English words during the thought suppression task? If yes: what were they? Was there any theme? No participant reported knowledge of the subliminal primes or experimental hypotheses. Results and Discussion We submitted the amount of money made during the ultimatum game to a 2 (prime: profit vs. equity) X 2 (thought attribution: internal source vs. external source) ANOVA. In line with our predictions, the only significant effect was the interaction between prime and thought attribution, F(1, 88) = 5.44, p =.02, ηp 2 =.06 (see Figure 1). Simple effects analyses showed that the primes only affected behavior when participants were encouraged to misattribute prime-related content to their own thoughts, F(1, 88) = 6.62, p =.01, ηp 2 =.07. In this internal source condition, participants primed with profit earned more money (M = $13.91, SD = $2.02) than those primed with equity (M = $11.87, SD = $2.53). When participants felt that their thoughts may have been created by an external source, there was no effect of prime, F < 1. In order to examine whether these effects were driven by a particular type of ultimatum game trial, we conducted a repeated measure ANOVA which built on the prior analysis but included trial type (proposal vs. offer rounds) as an additional within-subjects factor. This new factor did not qualify any effects, including the significant two-way interaction, F < 1, suggesting that both types of trials were equally affected by our manipulations. As expected, participants behavior was only affected by the primes when they were led to misattribute prime-related content to their own internal thoughts. When this was the case, individuals primed with profit adopted a strategy which

6 246 loersch AND PAYNE maximized their winnings within the ultimatum game and made more money than those primed with equity. When participants instead felt that this information could have been introduced by an external factor, the same primes had no effect. Importantly, this occurred even though construct accessibility was manipulated through a subliminal priming induction, providing evidence that the conceptual misattribution mechanism does not depend upon conscious awareness of the primes. In addition to providing evidence for this proposed process, these results also extend prior work regarding conscious knowledge of priming stimuli. That is, while others have demonstrated that participants will correct for the influence of obvious (Martin, 1986) or consciously remembered primes (Lombardi, Higgins, & Bargh, 1987), we are the first to show that the same processes can apply even when people simply suspect an unknown source may affect them. Although these findings provide initial evidence for a misattribution mechanism of behavior priming, two important issues remain. First, it remains unclear whether the results were obtained because misattribution to an internal source caused a priming effect, or if attribution of accessible information to an external source prevented one. In order to address this concern, Experiment 2 added a control condition to the subliminal priming and thought attribution task. Additionally, it is possible that conceptual misattribution may only influence the effects of primes on deliberate, reflective behavior. If this is the case, the results we observed may only occur in situations like those present in the ultimatum game where people actively deliberate between possible strategies. We suspected, however, that thought attributions would influence even spontaneous, reflexive behavior. Experiment 2 was designed to address this concern. Experiment 2 In this experiment, participants were subliminally primed with either fast or slow during the same priming procedure used in Experiment 1. Participants then read a number of instruction screens while preparing for upcoming tasks. We sought to measure the impact of the primes on a non-deliberative, reflexive behavior by assessing participants per-word reading speed as they processed these instructions. We selected this behavior as a computer analog of the classic walking speed measure utilized in past research (e.g., Bargh et al., 1996; Dijksterhuis et al., 1998). As with walking speed, the pace with which to read instructions after completing a task is highly ambiguous and not tightly constrained by any particular task demands. Although it can be controlled, subjects are unlikely to actively monitor such behavior, increasing the spontaneous and unobtrusive quality of the measure. Experiment 2 also added a control condition to the two thought attribution conditions of the previous study. This allowed us to determine whether a behavioral priming effect is produced in the internal source condition or eliminated in the external source condition.

7 MISATTRIBUTION AND PRIMING 247 Method Participants One hundred and twenty-two participants were randomly assigned to a 2 (prime: fast vs. slow) X 3 (thought attribution: internal source, external source, or control) factorial, between-subjects design. Materials and Procedure Priming Task. Participants first completed the priming and thought suppression task described in Experiment 1. The primes were modified to activate the constructs of either fast (fast, quick, & rapid) or slow (careful, cautious, & slow). Each prime was shown 30 times, resulting in 90 separate priming trials. Stimuli were displayed using a 60 Hz refresh rate and were presented using the eprime software package. Thought Attribution. Instructions for the internal and external source conditions were identical to those used in Experiment 1. In order to implement a control condition, three new trials were added to the thought suppression task. In these trials (presented randomly), the number 105 was shown in the center of the screen for ms. Participants in the control condition were informed that they were completing a surveillance task and were asked to scan the rapidly changing stimuli for the number 105, keeping track of how many times it appeared. This provided a hanging control which allowed us to examine the effects of the primes while also providing a neutral attribution for the presence of the various stimuli presented during the task. Behavioral Measure. To assess the impact of the primes, we measured participants reading speed as they processed five instruction screens which began immediately following the thought suppression task (236 words in sum). 1 After reading each screen, subjects advanced in the experiment by pressing the space bar. The computer recorded the time spent on each screen and this value was divided by the number of words on the screen to calculate per-word reading speed. We also measured baseline reading speed by assessing the amount of time participants spent reading the instruction screen which immediately preceded the thought suppression task. This was used as a covariate in the analyses. After the experiment, participants completed the same funnel-debriefing procedure used in Experiment 1 and were debriefed. No participants reported knowledge of the subliminal primes or experimental hypotheses. 1.. These screens introduced three tasks, during which participants answered questions about their thought suppression task performance and then completed dot estimation and lexical decision tasks that were unrelated to the primed concepts. The dot estimation and lexical decision tasks were timed and required fast responses, which we included in order to examine whether the primes improved participants ability to respond fast when actively trying (as opposed to reading instructions where decisions regarding the appropriate speed were spontaneous and unconstrained). Participants response times were unaffected by any factor including prime when they were explicitly engaged in these tasks (all Fs < 1.59), suggesting that the primes did not improve ability or performance.

8 248 loersch AND PAYNE Results and Discussion Participants reading speed was submitted to a 2 (prime: fast vs. slow) X 3 (thought attribution: internal source, external source, or control) ANCOVA. Reading speed prior to the thought suppression task was used as the covariate and was a marginally significant predictor of post-manipulation reading speed, F(1, 115) = 3.09, p =.08, ηp 2 =.03. In line with our predictions, the only significant effect was the predicted interaction between prime and thought attribution, F(1, 115) = 3.33, p =.04, ηp 2 =.05 (see Figure 2). Simple effects analyses showed that the primes only had a significant influence for participants in the internal source condition, F(1, 115) = 4.47, p =.04, ηp 2 =.04. For this group, participants primed with fast read each word more quickly (M = 231 ms, SD = 69.9 ms) than those primed with slow (M = 265 ms, SD = 67.1 ms). This difference did not emerge for participants in the control condition or for participants led to attribute their thoughts to an external source. Participants in the control condition behaved identically regardless of prime, F < 1, and participants in the external source condition showed a nonsignificant tendency to contrast away from the behavioral implications of the prime, F(1, 115) = 2.09, p =.15, ηp 2 =.02. For this group, individuals primed with fast tended to spend more time per word (M = 256 ms, SD = 76.9 ms) than those primed with slow (M = 225 ms, SD = 50.7 ms). Replicating Experiment 1, we found that primes influenced behavior only under conditions which encouraged participants to misattribute prime-related content to their own thoughts. Comparison to the control condition suggests that the misattribution of primed concepts was necessary for the priming effect in this experiment. In addition, these results were obtained using a computer analog of the classic walking speed measure (Bargh et al., 1996; Dijksterhuis et al., 1998), participants reading speed. Given that this measure was obtained while participants simply read instructions for upcoming tasks in the experiment, it is unlikely that the change in behavior was driven by a conscious, deliberative choice. The use of both subliminal primes and reflexive behavior suggests that the proposed conceptual misattribution process can operate at a nonconscious level. General Discussion Source monitoring errors underlie a large number of psychological phenomena (Higgins, 1998). From false memories (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994), to false confessions (Kassin & Kiechel, 1996), to the conscious experience of free will (Aarts, 2007; Wegner & Wheatley, 1999), attributional errors can sew confusion about one s own thoughts. Similar attribution errors have been found to influence emotion production (Schachter & Singer, 1962), cognitive dissonance based attitude change (Zanna & Cooper, 1974), evaluative conditioning based attitude formation (Jones, Fazio, & Olson, 2009), the development of sexual attraction (Dutton & Aron, 1974), and judgments of life satisfaction (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). And finally, targeted misattribution has been successfully used as a therapeutic tool to treat patients with chronic insomnia (Storms & Nisbett, 1970) and snake phobias (Valins & Ray, 1967).

9 MISATTRIBUTION AND PRIMING 249 Figure 2. Per-word reading time (ms) in Experiment 2 as a function of subliminal prime and thought attribution. In the current work, we examined whether these attributional processes could also modulate the influence of conceptual primes on behavior. In line with the proposals of misattribution-based accounts of behavior priming, we found that primes were most likely to influence behavior when people became confused about the source of prime-related information and misattributed it to their own internal thoughts. The same primes had no effect on behavior when participants instead attributed accessible information to an external source or under a no attribution control condition. Critically, these effects occurred even using a subliminal priming induction which affected both deliberative behavior (Experiment 1) and spontaneous behavior (Experiment 2). This allows the current findings to pair nicely with prior research on the automaticity of attributional processes (e.g., Hassin, Bargh, & Uleman, 2002; Jones et al., 2009; Whittlesea, Jacoby, & Girard, 1990) in demonstrating that (mis)attribution can operate at a nonconscious level. Although an attributional mechanism has been postulated by some recent theories of behavior priming (Loersch & Payne, 2011; Wheeler et al., 2007), we provide the first direct empirical test of this hypothesis. Limitations Although this research provides the first empirical evidence for the role of attribution in the production of behavioral priming effects, there are a number of limitations. The experiments do not differentiate between the two misattribution mechanisms proposed by the active-self account (Wheeler et al., 2007) and situated inference model (Loersch & Payne, 2011). For example, it may be that participants who expect our thought attribution manipulation to effectively eliminate all mental content subsequently perceive any accessible information as emerging from their true self, thereby encouraging its incorporation into the active self-concept.

10 250 loersch AND PAYNE Alternatively, these individuals may simply misattribute the prime-related mental content to their thoughts about how to behave during the experiment, thereby changing their actions without producing any meaningful change in the self. Additional work is needed to address such questions. Our general approach of comparing the effects of primes with contrasting behavioral implications also limits the conclusions of the experiments. Although this allows us to optimize our power while limiting sample size, the lack of a neutral priming condition makes it unclear whether the behavioral effects we observe are due to one particular prime s influence or whether both actually push behavior in opposite directions. One may also wonder why no behavioral priming effect was found in the control condition of Experiment 2. First, it is worthwhile to note that this is actually fairly common in research investigating the moderators of behavioral priming (e.g., Dijksterhuis et al., 1998; DeMarree et al., 2005). Such findings are particularly noteworthy because they highlight just how important it can be to take such factors into consideration. In addition, the priming procedure we use here (i.e., the thought suppression task) is somewhat different from those used in many other studies. In the current work, we capitalized on this procedure s unique properties so that we could manipulate and observe the proposed misattribution process. Although this novel procedure allowed us to reveal the operation of a process which is normally obscured, it is difficult to compare directly to other priming manipulations that have been used in past research. Finally, the control condition we utilized in this paradigm involved actively monitoring for and counting the occurrences of a particular stimulus. This may have increased the cognitive load of participants, a factor that has been found to disrupt cognitive activation processes in past research (e.g., Gilbert & Hixon, 1991; Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorn, & Castelli, 1997) and may have reduced effects of our primes. This limitation, however, mainly concerns the ability to compare the control condition to other studies, and does not undermine our conclusions regarding the core hypothesis about the role of misattribution in behavior priming. Conclusion In two experiments we found that primes influenced behavior only when participants were encouraged to misattribute the information made accessible by the primes to their own thoughts. When this misattribution process was not encouraged, the same primes had no effect. These results provide empirical support for theories of behavior priming which propose conceptual misattribution processes. In documenting a new situational influence which moderates the influence of behavioral primes, the current work also suggests a number of novel factors that should have similar effects. These range from individual differences in the susceptibility to misattribution, such as aging, to other situational factors, like timepressured decision making, and complex environments, that may limit people s ability to accurately assess the source of their current thoughts.

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