Priming and authorship ascription: when nonconscious goals turn into conscious experiences of self-agency.
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.
Aarts
Henk
H
Utrecht University, Department of Psychology, Utrecht, The Netherlands. h.aarts@uu.nl
Custers
Ruud
R
Marien
Hans
H
D000339:Affect; D001364:Awareness; D003071:Cognition; D003243:Consciousness; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007389:Internal-External Control; D009042:Motivation; D012649:Self Concept; D013360:Subliminal Stimulation; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology