doi:10.1016/j.tics.2003.11.004

How social perception can

automatically inﬂuence behavior

Melissa J. Ferguson

and John A. Bargh

Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA

Do we always know the reasons for our actions? Or is

our behavior sometimes unknowingly and unintention-

ally inﬂuenced by what we have recently perceived? It

has been traditionally assumed that the automatic inﬂu-

ence of knowledge in memory is limited to people’s

interpretation of the world, and stops short of shaping

their actual behavior. Researchers in experimental

social psychology have begun to challenge this

assumption by documenting how people’s behaviors

can be unknowingly inﬂuenced by knowledge that is

incidentally activated in memory during social percep-

tion. We review ﬁndings that suggest that the social

knowledge that is incidentally activated while reading

words or imagining events subsequently affects partici-

pants’ behaviors across a range of ostensibly unrelated

domains.

Experimental social psychologists have amassed a large

body of ﬁndings over the past three decades suggesting

that social knowledge is automatically activated in

memory during the natural course of perception. That is,

while people are seeing and listening to the world around

them, social knowledge that corresponds to perceived

stimuli is spontaneously and immediately activated in

memory without people’s awareness or intention. This

research has also shown that automatically activated

information then shapes and guides people’s impressions,

judgments, feelings and intentions without people being

aware that such inﬂuence is occurring [1–3].

Although there is now a general consensus that people’s

understanding of the world is automatically shaped by

previous experiences and knowledge, many people assume

that complex behaviors are untainted by such inﬂuences.

Instead, behaviors are often presumed to result solely from

conscious, intentional thought. Recent research in social

psychology has placed this long-standing assumption

under scrutiny by showing that complex behaviors can

also be automatically initiated and guided. This represents

a signiﬁcant shift in the kind of effects automatic social

knowledge activation has, from subjective impressions of

the world to actual behaviors in the world. Such a shift is

crucial for developing theories, not only about how

behavioral information is represented in memory, but

also about the determinants of everyday behaviors. Just as

previous research has informed us that our impressions of

the world are inevitably shaped by factors outside of our

awareness, the current work suggests that we might not

always be aware of how we are behaving – or perhaps

more importantly, why. This article ﬁrst brieﬂy describes

the research on how incidental knowledge activation

inﬂuences judgments and impressions, and then reviews

recent ﬁndings concerning automatic effects on social

behavior.

Perception automatically activates social knowledge

Social psychological research about how social knowledge

is automatically activated during perception was inspired

by research in cognitive psychology a quarter of a century

ago [4,5]. Cognitive psychologists showed that the percep-

tion of a stimulus in the environment (e.g. a bird) activates

in memory a vast array of semantically and lexically

related information (e.g. robin, wings, trees, etc.). This was

discovered using priming paradigms, which demonstrated

that people inevitably ‘go beyond the information given’,

inferring more information from a perceived stimulus than

is physically present [6]. Furthermore, this work showed

that the activation of such knowledge does not require the

perceiver’s intention [4,5].

Inspired by these ﬁndings, social psychologists demon-

strated that social information is also activated in an

automatic fashion (see Box 1) [1–3]. Using a variety of

priming methodologies, researchers established that when

a person perceives a member of a social group, such as an

elderly person, information about that group is instantly

activated, including attitudes, exemplars (i.e. memories of

individual group members), and social stereotypes (beliefs

and expectancies about the group; e.g. elderly people are

slow and forgetful) [7–9]. The perception of behaviors

themselves also leads to the activation of social knowledge.

When people read about an actor performing a behavior,

trait knowledge that corresponds to that behavior is

spontaneously and unintentionally activated [10–12].

Taken together, this research suggests that the perception

of any social stimulus will inevitably activate in memory a

diverse array of related knowledge.

Incidentally activated knowledge affects social judgment

Knowledge that is incidentally activated during percep-

tion can inﬂuence people’s judgments because it can guide

the categorization of judgment-relevant stimuli. Social

stimuli are often inherently ambiguous in that they are

multiply categorizable [13]. For instance, people can be

Corresponding author: Melissa J. Ferguson ([email protected]).

Review TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.8 No.1 January 2004

judged according to their membership in any of numerous

groups (e.g. race, sex, age, etc.), and social behaviors can

usually be interpreted in multiple ways (e.g. is he acting in

a conceited or shy manner?). Because there are always

many categories into which a person or event can be

placed, the ultimate classiﬁcation of a stimulus will

depend on the relative accessibility of the relevant

categories [14].

This is when incidentally activated knowledge can

determine the categorization of a stimulus, and therefore

inﬂuence later judgments and interpretations. A particu-

lar category can become accessible because of the recent

perception of an event, and then capture a subsequently

encountered stimulus, even if the only relation between

the perceived event and the subsequent stimulus is a

semantic one. For instance, a particular social category,

such as African-Americans, might become activated

naturally and incidentally when perceiving a member of

that group in the street (or on television or in a

newspaper); but that category will remain activated

(‘primed’) for some time thereafter, even after the original

stimulus is no longer present in the environment. During

the time it remains active and accessible, it can inﬂuence

the categorization of other, race-ambiguous people. But

perhaps more importantly, because any categorization

carries with it a unique set of social stereotypes, attitudes

and knowledge, all of this associated knowledge (e.g.

stereotypic traits, such as hostility) also remains acces-

sible and likely to be used in the interpretation of other

people’s behavior. This well-established research suggests

that people are not only unaware of the information that is

activated during the normal course of perception, but also

of the way in which such information guides their

judgments and impressions of the world around them.

Incidentally activated knowledge affects behavior

Until recently, it has been largely assumed that although

judgments and feelings can be shaped by factors outside of

people’s awareness, complex social behavior is determined

by people’s conscious and deliberately made choices. This

assumption is part of a rich tradition of rational-choice

theories of behavior as well as the humanistic tradition

within psychology, both of which assume that people more

or less carefully and intentionally weigh their behavioral

options and then choose the optimal one [1,2].

In contrast to this assumption, researchers in social

psychology have begun to demonstrate that complex

behavior is also automatically shaped and guided by the

knowledge that is incidentally activated during percep-

tion. Their argument builds on previous theory and

research suggesting that behavioral representations can

be automatically activated in memory during perception,

and, once activated, can guide actual behavior.

Perception activates behavioral representations

Numerous theorists have argued that behavior is mentally

represented in a similar way to other social information

such as judgments and attitudes. In particular, theorists

have asserted that behavioral and perceptual represen-

tations are closely interconnected in memory [15–24], and

recent research supports this claim. For instance,

researchers have found, in both Macaque monkeys [25]

and humans [26], that the same area of the premotor

cortex is active both when monkeys and humans perceive

an action and when they perform that action themselves.

On the assumption that behavioral responses are

mentally represented and associated with perceptual

representations, behavioral responses might be among

the forms of knowledge that are automatically activated in

response to perceiving a social stimulus. For instance, just

as a stereotype presumably becomes associated with a

group after repeated group – stereotype pairings, a beha-

vior that a person repeatedly performs in a particular

situation, or in response to a particular other person,

Box 1. Automaticity in contemporary social psychology

What constitutes an automatic effect of knowledge activation on

judgment or behavior? Historically, efﬁcient processes that occur

without the person’s awareness, intention or control have been

considered automatic [3 –5,56–58]. Research that addresses

whether a given process meets these criteria for automaticity,

as well as speculation about how the concept of automaticity

should be conceptualized, is prevalent within social psychology

[1–3,56–57,59–64]. Much contemporary work on automatic pro-

cesses, however, has focused on the criterion of awareness

(although see research on efﬁcient social processes [10,11]). In

particular, given the well-established ﬁnding that people are

unaware of the vast amount of social knowledge that becomes

activated during social perception, researchers have tested the

degree to which people’s judgments and behavior are unknowingly

inﬂuenced by such incidental knowledge activation. If participants

are unaware that their behavior has been inﬂuenced by recently

perceived information, they necessarily did not intend such an

inﬂuence, nor could they have controlled the inﬂuence. Although

this kind of operationalization of automaticity is regularly being

scrutinized and reﬁned, it does effectively capture the unintentional

and non-conscious aspects of many social behaviors, the determi-

nants of which have traditionally been assumed to be completely

conscious and deliberate.

How do researchers ensure that participants are unaware of the

impact of a priming episode ontheirjudgment or behavior?Thecritical

requirement is that participants do not suspect any inﬂuence of the

priming on their subsequent behavior [65], and this can be

accomplished even when participants are consciously processing

the priming stimuli, as long as the cover story obscures the relation

between the two. Accordingly, many researchers present priming

stimuli in tasks that are ostensibly unrelated to subsequent dependent

measures [66]. One common method is to use a scrambled sentence

taskinwhichprimewordsare embeddedinsentencesthatparticipants

have to unscramble as part of a ‘linguistic task’ [67].

At the end of an experiment, researchers carefully assess

participants’ suspicion by administering a ‘funnel debrieﬁng’ [66].

This procedure consists of increasingly speciﬁc questions aimed at

probing participants’ awareness and suspicion. For example, the ﬁrst

question asks participants to speculate in general about the purpose

of the experiment, whereas the later questions ask whether they

noticed any connection between certain words in the ﬁrst part of the

experiment, and their answers or behaviors in the latter part of the

experiment [66]. Although this type of measure might not capture

those participants who were actually suspicious but do not want to

admit to ‘spoiling’ the experimenter’s plans [68], it could encourage

those participants who actually were not suspicious to report

nevertheless their awareness to avoid appearing gullible. Because

there are possible ways in which a funnel debrieﬁng might be either a

conservative or liberal proxy of awareness, researchers are con-

tinually striving for more sensitive ways to measure the degree to

which behavioral effects occur non-consciously.

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might become associated in memory with the features of

that situation or person. In both cases, the mere perception

of the group member, or situation, might automatically

activate the respective stereotype or behavior.

Activated behavioral information affects behavior

Assuming that behavioral responses are represented

mentally and can be automatically activated during the

normal course of perception, can they inﬂuence how a

person behaves? There is a long history of theories arguing

for this very possibility. For example, William Carpenter in

the 1860s developed the principle of ‘ideomotor action’, in

which simply thinking about an action is sufﬁcient to lead

to the performance of that action [27,28]. William James

elaborated on this notion in the 1890s by asserting that the

occurrence of thoughts about actions leads to the perform-

ance of those actions unless the person consciously

intervenes to prevent it [29].

Much contemporary work on human mimicry suggests

that in fact the perception of certain actions can lead to the

performance of those actions. There is abundant evidence

that people exhibit imitative behavior from an early age

onwards, mimicking everything from facial expressions to

the speech of their conversation partners [30–33]. This

research suggests that the knowledge that is activated in

response to perceiving a given action can also lead to the

performance of that same action, at least for simple

behaviors such as facial expressions and the use of syntax.

Recent research on automatic social behavior

Social psychologists have recently explored whether more

complex social behavior is inﬂuenced by incidental knowl-

edge activation. For example, although research has

suggested that people will adopt the accent of a conversa-

tion partner [32], will a person act more aggressively if she

or he perceives the trait hostility? As an initial attempt to

test this possibility, Bargh, Chen and Burrows [16]

covertly primed participants with trait knowledge about

rudeness (Study 1), stereotypes of the elderly (and thus the

trait slowness; Study 2), and stereotypes of African-

Americans (and thus the trait hostility; Study 3).

Those participants primed with trait information were

signiﬁcantly more likely than non-primed participants to

show behavior relevant to the primed trait: speciﬁcally, to

interrupt another person (Study 1), walk slowly down the

hallway (Study 2), or express hostility after being

provoked (Study 3). Crucially, none of the participants

reported any awareness of a connection between the

priming episode and their behavior (see Box 1). Thus,

when participants faced a situation that could be

responded to with either rudeness or politeness, slow or

fast walking, hostility or calmness, they acted in accord-

ance with trait information covertly primed only minutes

before in an unrelated context.

This ﬁrst set of studies laid the groundwork for research

that has since examined how various behaviors can be

automatically guided by information that is incidentally

activated from the environment. The studies over the past

ﬁve years differ in terms of the source of social knowledge

activation (e.g. traits, stereotypes, behavior, contexts) as

well as the nature of the behavioral effects (e.g. simple,

complex).

Trait knowledge inﬂuences behavior

Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg [21] addressed

whether social behavior that is more complex than

walking speed or hostility can be primed. They subtly

primed participants with the trait ‘intelligence’or

‘stupidity’, and then asked them to complete an

ostensibly unrelated knowledge test that included

questions such as ‘Who painted La Guernica?’ (a. Dali,

b. Miro, c. Picasso, d. Velasquez), and ‘What is the capital of

Bangladesh?’ (a. Dhaka, b. Hanoi, c. Yangon, d. Bangkok).

Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg expected that

priming participants with intelligence or stupidity would

lead to the increased accessibility of related knowledge,

including behavioral responses associated with the corre-

sponding concept. This activated knowledge would then

affect their performance on the test, relative to non-primed

participants. As expected, those primed with ‘intelligence’

signiﬁcantly outperformed non-primed participants

whereas those primed with ‘stupidity’ signiﬁcantly under-

performed non-primed participants. None of the partici-

pants reported any awareness of a connection between the

priming episode and the test. These results suggest that

incidentally activated knowledge can inﬂuence even

complex behavior, such as performance on a knowledge

test.

Behavioral information inﬂuences behavior

Researchers have also explored whether knowledge other

than trait information might inﬂuence people’s behavior in

an automatic fashion. Given the evidence that people tend

to adopt the tone and speech of their conversation

partners, researchers have examined whether people

might also unknowingly mimic the actions of their

conversation partners [34–38]. Several recent articles

provide support for this hypothesis, and show, for example,

that people are signiﬁcantly more likely to shake their foot

or rub their face unconsciously if their conversation

partner is doing so than if their partner is not [19]. In all

of these studies, participants were carefully questioned

after the experiment to assess their awareness of their own

and their partner’s behaviors. Participants did not report

any awareness of their own behavior, their partner’s

behavior, or any relation between the two. This research

suggests that the mere perception of actions automatically

increases the likelihood of the performance of those same

actions, without the person’s intention or awareness.

Recent work has expanded upon this topic by showing

that the perception of behaviors does not always increase

the likelihood of performing those same behaviors. Tiedens

and Fragale [39] hypothesized that the perception of

behaviors that connote high or low status might non-

consciously lead to the adoption of the opposite (i.e. low or

high status, respectively) behaviors. The ﬁndings suggest

that when participants interacted with a partner whose

posture suggested dominance (i.e. an expansive posture),

the participants themselves non-consciously adopted

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submissive postures (i.e. restricted). A sensitive probing

process at the end of these experiments indicated that

participants were not aware of their own posture, their

partner’s posture, or any connection between the two.

Thus, the perception of another’s behavior can uninten-

tionally and unknowingly lead to the performance of either

that same behavior, or one that is diametrically opposed in

terms of the socially relevant dimension of status.

Goal-relevant information inﬂuences behavior

In addition to investigating the kinds of information that

can inﬂuence social behavior, researchers have also

explored the type of behavior that can result from such

an inﬂuence [40–43]. Recent research by Bargh et al. [42]

suggests that incidental social perception also activates

goal knowledge that can automatically inﬂuence actual

goal-pursuit – that is, behavior that is directed towards an

objective, persists over time, and resumes after an

interruption.

Across several studies, participants were covertly

primed with words related to achievement, and then

completed a series of word-search puzzles. Not only did

primed participants perform signiﬁcantly better than non-

primed participants during the same time period, they

were more likely than non-primed participants to maxi-

mize their performance by disobeying experimenter

instructions to stop working on the task. Primed partici-

pants were also signiﬁcantly more likely than non-primed

participants to choose to continue working on the puzzles

after an interruption rather than begin a cartoon-assess-

ment task that had been rated in another study as more

enjoyable. As in other experiments in this area of research,

none of the participants in any of the studies reported any

awareness of a connection between the priming tasks and

the dependent measures. This type of research can

potentially extend the effects of incidental knowledge

activation on behavior from relatively static displays of a

trait-consistent action, to complex, feedback-dependent

sequences of behaviors.

Context information inﬂuences behavior

Researchers have also investigated whether the percep-

tion of social settings might also inﬂuence behavior in a

similar fashion. Aarts and Dijksterhuis [44] used as

priming stimuli locations that were associated with

situational norms (i.e. prescriptions for acceptable beha-

vior within a certain situation). For example, some

participants were primed with stimuli related to libraries,

a location for which the norm is quiet behavior. Those who

were primed with the location and who had the goal to visit

the location later behaved in ways that were consistent

with the norm for that location. For instance, those primed

with library subsequently recited a text passage in a

signiﬁcantly softer voice than non-primed participants.

Again, none of the participants reported any awareness of

a connection between the priming procedure and the

subsequent dependent measures.

As another example of research that shows how context

information inadvertently inﬂuences behavior, research-

ers have examined whether participants who are primed

with crowded group-settings display different amounts of

helping behavior compared with non-primed participants.

Given the well-established ﬁnding in social psychology

that people in a crowd exhibit less helping behavior than

people who are alone [45], Garcia et al. [46] tested whether

the incidental activation of knowledge about being in a

large group might automatically inﬂuence later, ostensibly

unrelated helping behavior. They asked participants

either to imagine themselves in a group, or alone (e.g. in

a crowded or empty movie theater) and then measured

their willingness in a variety of helping behaviors, such as

donating money to charity. Those who imagined them-

selves in a group context later exhibited signiﬁcantly less

helping behavior than control participants. Great care was

taken across ﬁve studies to ensure that participants did

not suspect any connection between the priming task and

the helping measure, and indeed, none of the participants

reported any suspicion. These studies suggest that

behavioral information can be activated from the mere

perception of social settings or contexts (such as a library,

or a crowded movie theater) and subsequently inﬂuence

actual behavior in the absence of people’s intentions and

awareness.

Parameters of the effect of social perception on behavior

A crucial question concerns the mechanisms that might

underlie such automatic effects on behavior, and research-

ers have identiﬁed both some boundary conditions as well

as some potential mechanisms [15,47–50]. For example,

Dijksterhuis and colleagues [49,50] have explored how the

concreteness of the priming stimuli inﬂuences the nature

of the effect, by priming participants with trait information

either via social groups (e.g. the group professors activates

the trait intelligence) or via exemplars of those social

groups (e.g. Albert Einstein also primes the trait

Figure 1. Percentage correct on a general knowledge test as a function of the type

(stereotype or exemplar) and direction (intelligence or stupidity) of the primes. Par-

ticipants were covertly primed with a stereotype indicating intelligence ( pro-

fessors) versus stupidity (supermodels), or an exemplar indicating intelligence

(Albert Einstein) versus stupidity (Claudia Schiffer). A signiﬁcant interaction

between the type and direction of primes on percentage correct emerged, such

that whereas stereotype primes led to assimilation effects (participants’ behavior

was in accord with the direction of the prime), exemplar primes led to contrast

effects (participants’ behavior was in contrast with the direction of the prime). In

other words, whereas those primed with professors signiﬁcantly outperformed

those primed with supermodels, those primed with Albert Einstein signiﬁcantly

underperformed those primed with Claudia Schiffer. Adapted from [50].

TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences

Direction of prime

% correct

Stereotype

Exemplar

Intelligent Stupid

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intelligence). In line with ﬁndings from the social

judgment literature [51–53], those participants primed

with a social group (i.e. abstract information) exhibited

behavior in line with traits associated with the group (i.e.

assimilative effects), but those primed with exemplars

from the group (i.e. relatively more concrete information)

exhibited behavior in contrast with the associated trait

(i.e. contrast effects; see Figure 1).

Researchers have argued that whereas the perception

of an abstract prime activates an interpretive frame that is

used to interpret subsequent stimuli, the perception of

concrete exemplars invokes comparative processes

whereby the exemplar anchors the dimension of judgment

along which subsequent stimuli are judged. When the

exemplars are extreme, most subsequently perceived (or in

this case, performed) behaviors will be positioned away

from the exemplar. Dijksterhuis and colleagues [49]

argued that contrast effects emerge in behavior because

participants implicitly compare themselves with the

primed exemplar and then act accordingly.

As one might expect, the magnitude of the priming

effect on behavior has been found to depend upon the

strength of association in memory between the prime

material (e.g. the social group, context, trait, stereotype)

and the particular behavior. Dijksterhuis and colleagues

[54] predicted that the effect of priming participants with

‘elderly people’ on later memory performance would be

contingent on how much contact participants previously

had with the elderly. As expected, those participants with

lots of previous contact with the elderly performed

signiﬁcantly worse on a memory test after being covertly

primed with the group (this was expected because poor

memory is part of the elderly stereotype). However, those

with little previous contact did not show any priming

effect, suggesting that the degree to which incidental

knowledge activation increases the likelihood of perform-

ing an associated behavior depends on the presence and

strength of that association in memory. Presumably, the

belief about the elderly having poor memory was

reinforced in those who interacted frequently with

members of the group.

Researchers have also recently examined whether the

effect on later behavior of being primed with a social group

is mediated by the activation of traits associated with that

group. Kawakami et al. [55] tested whether the effect of

being primed with elderly on response speed in a lexical-

decision task depended on the activation of the trait slow

(see Figure 2). The ﬁndings showed a priming effect on

behavior, as primed participants exhibited a signiﬁcantly

slower response speed overall compared with non-primed

participants. In addition, primed participants responded

signiﬁcantly faster to stereotype-consistent (e.g. slow)

than to inconsistent traits, compared with non-primed

participants, who showed no difference, suggesting that

the stereotyped traits were activated in memory, as

expected. Most importantly, however, the effect of priming

on behavior (overall slowness of responses) was indepen-

dent of the effect of priming on stereotype trait activation.

This suggests that the perception of a stimulus activates a

diverse array of knowledge (e.g. behaviors, traits, exem-

plars), and that types of knowledge can have independent

effects on subsequent behavior.

Conclusions

Over the past ﬁve years, researchers in experimental

social psychology have demonstrated not only that people’s

judgments and attitudes are sometimes automatically

inﬂuenced by factors outside of their awareness, but that

their actual behaviors are as well. Given the inherent

ambiguity in social stimuli and situations, and thus the

range of behavioral responses that might be appropriate

for any given situation, it seems likely that people’s

Figure 2. Reaction time to words in a lexical-decision task as a function of priming

condition (elderly vs. non-primed control) and type of target words (stereotypic of

the elderly vs. non-stereotypic of the elderly). The results suggest a priming effect

on behavior such that primed participants responded signiﬁcantly more slowly

overall than non-primed participants. They also suggest a priming effect on stereo-

type activation such that primed participants responded signiﬁcantly faster to

stereotypic than to non-stereotypic words, whereas non-primed participants

showed no difference. Importantly, a mediational analysis demonstrated that the

effect of priming on overall response speed was independent of the effect on

stereotype activation, suggesting that behavioral effects are not necessarily

mediated by the activation of group-relevant traits. Adapted from [55].

TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences

Priming condition

Reaction time (ms)

Stereotypic words

Non-stereotypic words

500

520

540

560

580

600

620

640

660

680

700

Elderly Control

Box 2. Questions for future research

† What types of activated knowledge mediate effects on behavior?

For example, assuming that the mere perception of a stimulus

activates trait, context, goal, affective and behavioral information,

which types of knowledge mediate the variety of effects shown in

this recent research?

† To what degree do priming effects on complex behavior meet the

traditional four criteria for automaticity? For example, to what

extent does participant suspicion of a relation between the

priming episode and the dependent measures qualify as an

‘automatic’ priming effect on behavior? What cognitive capacity is

required for these effects to occur?

† What are the necessary preconditions for incidental acts of social

perception to inﬂuence relatively static displays of behavior (e.g.

walking slowly), and how do these differ (if at all) from the

conditions needed to inﬂuence more complex and feedback-

dependent sequences of behavior (e.g. the attempt to achieve

across multiple tasks and interruptions)?

† What is the magnitude and duration of these types of priming

effects, and what factors moderate these variables?

† What sources of knowledge affect behavior in an automatic

fashion, beyond those that have been studied so far?

† To what extent do priming effects on various sorts of complex

behavior occur in real-life situations (i.e. outside the laboratory)?

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behavior is often shaped and guided in part by knowledge

that has become accessible through incidental means, such

as unrelated recent experiences. This suggests that, in

contrast to the assumption that we always consciously

decide how to behave, we might routinely be unaware of

some or even many of the determinants of our behavior.

Future research in this area will increasingly focus on

the mechanisms that underlie the apparent potential

independence of conscious intention and actual behavior

(see Box 2). Not only will this research identify boundary

conditions and mediators of such effects, it is likely to

uncover a variety of neural substrates that underlie or

enable the effects. For example, there is emerging evidence

from cognitive neuroscience that points to fundamental

dissociations in the human brain between those structures

that are responsible for guiding complex motor behavior,

and those that afford conscious access to our current

intentions and purposes [15]. As researchers gather more

information about the nature of these non-conscious

effects, we may begin to understand more fully the

phenomenon of behavior without intention.

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