Chapter thirteen - The Mind in the Middle

Summary

This chapter summarizes the research methods commonly used to explore the cognitive representations and processes that mediate between environmental events and human reactions to them, be those responses impressions, judgments, evaluations, emotions, goals, or behavior. It focuses primarily on passive, or unintentional, forms of cognitive mediation in an attempt to keep it distinct from motivational mediation as much as possible. Priming and automaticity research techniques share a concern with the ways that internal mental states mediate, in a passive and hidden manner, the effects of the social environment on psychological and behavioral responses. There are a variety of experimental techniques that fall under the general umbrella of priming research: conceptual priming, mindset priming, and sequential priming. There are two major ways of establishing the existence of the automatic connections: through analyses of output order in free-recall memory measures (clustering) and through sequential priming techniques.