John Bargh
| John A. Bargh | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 9, 1955 Champaign, Illinois |
| Fields | Social psychology |
| Institutions | Yale University |
| Alma mater |
University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1981) New York University |
| Known for | Perception-Behavior Link, Goal-Activation, Unconscious Processing |
| Influences | Robert Zajonc |
John A. Bargh (/ˈbɑːrdʒ/; born 1955) is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory. Bargh’s work focuses on automaticity and unconscious processing as a method to better understand social behavior, as well as philosophical topics such as free will. Much of Bargh's work investigates whether behaviors thought to be under volitional control may result from automatic interpretations of and reactions to external stimuli, such as words.
Bargh is particularly famous for his demonstrations of priming affecting action. One of the most well-known of these studies reported that reading words related to elderliness (e.g., "Florida", "Bingo") caused subjects to walk slower when exiting the laboratory, compared to subjects who read words unrelated to the elderly. Though cited almost 4,000 times, controversy has emerged because several recent studies failed to replicate the finding. Starting in 2013 and 2014, many additional reports began to emerge of failures to replicate findings from Bargh's lab. These included "social distance priming" and "achievement goal priming" and lonely people's preferences for hot baths. (However, in 2015 there was report of a successful replication of the association between loneliness and bathing habits, published in the journal Emotion, indicating a possible role for cultural differences in this case.) In March 2015 yet another paper from Bargh lab was reported to be unreproducible: Rotteveel and colleagues sought to duplicate two studies by Chen & Bargh (1999) arguing that objects are evaluated automatically, triggering a tendency to approach or avoid.
Bargh was born in Champaign, Illinois. He attended the University of Illinois as an undergraduate, and the University of Michigan for post-graduate training under Robert Zajonc. He received his Ph.D. in 1981. That same year he was hired as an assistant professor at New York University, where he remained for 22 years. He has since been working at Yale where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory.
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