Professor of Psychology

John Bargh's lines of research focus on the question of how much free will do people really have. He is interested in the extent to which any and all social psychological phenomena -- attitudes and evaluations, emotions, impressions, motivations, social behavior -- occur nonconsciously and automatically. Most recently his ACME lab (for Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Emotion) has focused on the automatic link between social perception and social behavior, which has been shown to cause people to tend to behave like those around them, without realizing they are doing so. Another active line of research concerns the automatic operation of motives and goals, such as social interaction goals (e.g., cooperation vs competition) and also information processing goals (e.g., to judge or appraise another's behavior). Most recently the ACME lab has been focusing on automatic influences of emotions on judgments and behavior, towards a model of nonconscious emotion regulation.

Selected Books
The New Unconscious (with R. Hassin & J. Uleman, eds.), Oxford University Press, New York, 2005

The Psychology of Action: Linking Motivation and Cognition to Behavior (with P.M. Gollwitzer, eds.), Guilford, New York, 1996

Selected Articles
"Thinking of You: Nonconscious Pursuit of Interpersonal Goals Associated with Relationship Partners" (with G.M. Fitzsimons), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 84, 148-164, 2003

"The Automatic Evaluation of Novel Stimuli" (with K.L. Duckworth, M. Garcia and S. Chaiken), Psychological Science, Vol. 13, 513-519, 2002

"The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals" (with P.M. Gollwitzer, A.Y. Lee-Chai, K. Barndollar and R. Troetschel), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81, 1014-1027, 2001

"Beyond Behaviorism: On the Automaticity of Higher Mental Processes" (with M.L. Ferguson), Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 126, 925-945, 2000

Education
PhD University of Michigan, 1981