ABSTRACT
A central theme in contemporary social psychology is that people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behavior are often shaped by factors that lie outside their awareness and cannot be fully understood by intuitive methods such as self-reection (Bargh, 1997; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). In the last 20 years, experimental social psychology has discovered an important window into mental life by discovering that attitudes and beliefs can be activated in memory without perceivers’ awareness or intention. Once activated, these cognitions and evaluations are difcult to suppress or inhibit in the moment and create prepotent action tendencies that facilitate evaluation-consistent behavior, judgments, and decisions. These subtle reactions have been variously labeled implicit, automatic, unconscious, or nonconscious (Bargh, 1994; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Kihlstrom, 1990). However, because it is rare for any psychological judgment or behavior to meet all of these criteria at the same time-lack of awareness, intention, effort, and control-any judgment that meets at least one of these criteria has been given these labels.
