Priming and authorship ascription: when nonconscious goals turn into conscious experiences of self-agency.

Full Abstract

The conscious experience of self-agency (i.e., the feeling that one causes one's own actions and their outcomes) is fundamental to human self-perception. Four experiments explored how experienced self-agency arises from a match between nonconsciously activated outcome representations and the subsequent production of the outcome and explored specifically how implicit motivation to produce the outcome may impinge on this process. Participants stopped a rapidly presented sequence of colors on a computer screen. Subsequently, they were presented with what could be the color on which they had stopped the sequence or a color that was randomly chosen by the computer. Agency ratings after each trial revealed that priming outcomes (a specific color) just before the outcome was produced enhanced experienced self-agency. Importantly, priming outcomes relatively far in advance also augmented self-agency, but only if the outcome was attached to positive affect and thus operating as a nonconscious goal maintaining the outcome representation active over time. As such, these studies show how the mechanisms underlying nonconscious goal pursuit promote experiences of self-agency, thus integrating 2 lines of research that so far have led separate lives. Copyright (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

Author information

Author/s: Aarts, Henk (H); Custers, Ruud (R); Marien, Hans (H);

Affiliation: Utrecht University, Department of Psychology, Utrecht, The Netherlands. h.aarts(-atsign-)uu.nl

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of personality and social psychology (J Pers Soc Psychol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-May; vol 96 (issue 5) : pp 967-79

Dates: Created 2009/04/21; Completed 2009/06/10;

PMID: 19379030, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 6/10/2009, IMS Date: 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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