PHIL 3440: Some Notes on Dual Process Data

1. Exam is Friday, December 15th at 10:30 am.
2. Papers are Due Monday, Dec. 11th.

3. Review questions will be Thursday, December 7, in class.

4. I will keep regular office hours Thursday, December 14th, and am available for appointments other times next week.

5. Handouts from the last month or so will be placed on the webpage by the end of the day today (barring technical troubles).

Notes from Last Time

1. Regarding the "Phone Booth" Study, in which subjects were shown to be more likely to help if they found a dime in the phone booth. The question was raised: Did the group of 'nonfinders' include subjects that simply did not look in the phone booth? If so, the group might have included subjects that were 'in a hurry' and therefore were less likely to help (a corroboration of the Good Samaritan Study we also described).

Here's what the phone booth study (Isen and Levin, 1972):

"The experimenter also checked to make sure that all subjects did look in the coin return slot. Only a few subjects failed to meet this requirement, and these were not included in the data analysis. This was done in order to avoid ultimately obtaining a sample of subjects which was inadvertently selected for attention." (387)

(Strike on up for the care of peer-reviewed scientific study…)

Some Notes on Automaticity

1. As we push the notion of automaticity further into central processes, it transforms the way we look at ourselves. Consciousness becomes the "tip of the iceberg" rather than the center of our mental lives.

2. One nice product of this research is we start to get a fuller picture of 'central processes'.

*'Central processes' are characterized by Fodor in Modularity of Mind as having the holistic properties of being isotropic and Quinean.

*In dual process accounts, we hear that central processes are conscious, reflective, slow, require intentional will, and so forth. These are additional, testable claims.

3. Intentional effort or "ego depletion": it turns out that we can measure both attentional and will resources.

Attentional resources might be measured simply by seeing how much stuff a person can attend to at once.

Ego resources can also be measured, resulting in studies like the Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven and Tice 1998 study discussed by Bargh and Chartrand (464-465) (see chart).

(reproduced from Bargh and Chartrand 1999, 465).

All this suggests that the will is a finite resource, one that can be spent wisely or poorly.

Lots of ego-depletion studies have now been done, and they show suprising things (e.g. like that self-reported "morning person" or "evening person" status predicts implicit racism across times of the day.

4. What isn't under control of attention may well be automated. E.g. unconscious mental representations may alter behavioral patterns, without conscious reasoning.

Carver et al. (1983) primed with hostility related words to increase shocking by 'teachers'

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) primed with:

Rude words (induced rudeness) -----> rudeness

Polite words (induced politeness------>politeness

Words associated with the elderly----------> Slow walking, forgetfulness

Subliminal faces of African Americans ------> hostility

Chartrand and Bargh (1999):

Random gestures -------->mimicking gestures

Mimicking gestures --------->social appreciation

Situation can activate behaviors without conscious choice, mediation…

5. Activating effort without choice

(Bargh et al. 1999) priming success --> performance, cheating

6. Activating goals without choice:

Bargh, Raymond, Pryor, & Strack (1995)

power ---> sexual attraction (in some men)

7. Perception-Evaluation (e.g. Haidt)