The Unbearable Automaticity of Being
John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand
New York University
What was noted by E. J. hanger (1978) remains true today:
that much of contemporary psychological research is based
on the assumption that people are consciously and system-
atically processing incoming information in order to con-
strue and interpret their world and to plan and engage in
courses of action. As did E. J. hanger, the authors question
this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability
to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually
quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psycho-
logical life must occur through nonconscious means if it is
to occur at all. The authors then describe the different
possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmen-
tal control over these various phenomena and review evi-
dence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms
as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and
behavior. Three major forms of automatic self-regulation
are identified: an automatic effect of perception on action,
automatic goal pursuit, and a continual automatic evalu-
ation of one’s experience. From the accumulating evi-
dence, the authors conclude that these various noncon-
scious mental systems perform the lion’s share of the
self-regulatory burden, beneficently keeping the individual
grounded in his or her current environment.
The strongest knowledge that of the total unfreedom of the
human will is nonetheless the poorest in successes, for it always
has the strongest opponent: human vanity.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I
magine for a moment that you are a psychology pro-
fessor who does experiments on conscious awareness.
You keep finding that your subtle manipulations of
people’s judgments and even behavior are successful
causing your experimental participants to like someone or
to dislike that same person, to feel happy or sad, to behave
rudely or with infinite patience. However, none of your
participants have a clue as to what caused them to feel or
behave in these ways. In fact, they don’t believe you, and
sometimes even argue with you, when you try to explain
your experiment to them and how they were caused to feel
or behave.
Now, let’s say you are home with your family for the
holidays or on vacation. Your aunt or brother-in-law asks
politely what your job is like. You attempt to explain your
research and even some of your more interesting findings.
Once again you are met with incredulity. "This can’t be
so," says your brother-in-law. "I can’t remember this ever
happening to me, even once."
Our thesis here that most of a person’s everyday life
is determined not by their conscious intentions and delib-
erate choices but by mental processes that are put into
motion by features of the environment and that operate
outside of conscious awareness and guidance is a difficult
one for people to accept. One cannot have any experiences
or memories of being nonconsciously influenced, of course,
almost by definition. But let us move from the layperson to
the experts (namely, psychological researchers) and see
what they have to say about the relative roles played by
conscious versus nonconscious causes of daily experience.
The major historical perspectives of 20th-century psy-
chology can be distinguished from one another based on
their positions on this question: Do people consciously and
actively choose and control (by acts of will) these various
experiences and behaviors, or are those experiences and
behaviors instead determined directly by other factors, such
as external stimuli or internal, unconscious forces?
Freud (e.g., 1901/1965), for example, considered hu-
man behavior to be determined mainly by biological im-
pulses and the unconscious interplay of the psychic forces
those impulses put into motion. The individual was de-
scribed as usually unaware of these intrapsychic struggles
and of their causal effect on his or her behavior, although
it was possible to become aware of them (usually on
Freud’s couch) and then change one’s patterns of behavior.
Early behaviorist theory (e.g., Skinner, 1938; Watson,
1913) similarly proposed that behavior was outside of
conscious control, but placed the source of the control not
in the psyche but in external stimulus conditions and
events. Environmental events directed all behavior in com-
bination with the person’s reinforcement history.
A third major perspective emerged in midcentury with
Rogers’s (1951) self theory and the humanist movement
(Kelly, 1955; Rotter, 1954). In what was a reaction to the
then-dominant Freudian and behavioristic perspectives, in
which "people were thought to be either pushed by their
inner drives or pulled by external events" (Seligman, 1991,
Editor’s note. Denise C. Park served as action editor for this article.
Author’s note. John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand, Department of
Psychology, New York University.
Tanya L. Chartrand is now at the Department of Psychology, Ohio
State University.
Preparation of this article was supported in part by Grant SBR-
9809000 from the National Science Foundation. We thank Ap Dijkster-
huis, Wendi Gardner, Ran Hassin, Larry Jacoby, and Dan Wegner for
helpful comments on a draft of the article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John
A. Bargh, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washing-
ton Place, Seventh Floor, New York, NY 10003. Electronic mail may be
sent to bargh@psych.nyu.edu.
462 July 1999 American Psychologist
Copyright 1999 by the American Psychological Association. Inc. 0003-066X/99/S2.00
Vol. 54, No. 7, 462-479

John A.
Bargh
pp. 8-9), the "causal self" was placed as a mediator be-
tween the environment and one’s responses to it. In these
self-theories, behavior was adapted to the current environ-
ment, but it was determined by an act of conscious choice.
Fifty years later, this perspective remains dominant among
theories of motivation and self-regulation (e.g., Bandura,
1986, 1990; Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Deci & Ryan,
1985; Dweck, 1996; Locke & Latham, 1990; Mischel,
Cantor, & Feldman, 1996).
Finally, the contemporary cognitive perspective, in
spirit as well as in practice, seeks to account for psycho-
logical phenomena in terms of deterministic mechanisms.
Although there exist models that acknowledge the role
played by higher-order choice or "executive" processes, the
authors of these models generally acknowledge that the
lack of specification of how these choices are made is an
inadequacy of the model. Neisser’s (1967) seminal book
Cognitive Psychology, for example, describes the "problem
of the executive," in which the flexible choice and selection
processes are described as a homunculus or "little person in
the head" that does not constitute a scientific explanation.
This position is echoed in Barsalou’s (1993) text, in which
he too calls free will a homunculus, noting that "most
cognitive psychologists believe that the fundamental laws
of the physical world determine human behavior com-
pletely" (p. 91).1
Fortunately, contemporary psychology for the most
part has moved away from doctrinaire either-or positions
concerning the locus of control of psychological phenom-
ena, to an acknowledgment that they are determined jointly
by processes set into motion directly by one’s environment
and by processes instigated by acts of conscious choice and
will. Such dual-process models (see Chaiken & Trope,
1999), in which the phenomenon in question is said to be
influenced simultaneously by conscious (control) and non-
conscious (automatic) processes, are now the norm in the
study of attention and encoding (e.g., Logan & Cowan,
1984; Neely, 1977, 1991; Posner & Snyder, 1975; Shiffrin,
1988), memory (e.g., Jacoby, 1991; Schachter, 1987;
Squire, 1987), emotional appraisal (e.g., Lazarus, 1991),
emotional disorders (e.g., Beck, 1976), attitudes and per-
suasion (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989; Fazio, 1990;
Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), and social perception and judg-
ment (e.g., Bargh, 1994; Devine, 1989; Fiske & Neuberg,
1990; Gilbert, 1991; Trope, 1986). Thus, the mainstream of
psychology accepts both the fact of conscious or willed
causation of mental and behavioral processes and the fact
of automatic or environmentally triggered processes. The de-
bate has shifted from the existence (or not) of these different
causal forces to the circumstances under which one versus the
other controls the mind. Is everyday life mainly comprised of
consciously or of nonconsciously caused evaluations, judg-
ments, emotions, motivations, and behavior?
As Posner and Snyder (1975, p. 55) noted a quarter
century ago, this question of how much conscious control
we have over our judgments, decisions, and behavior is one
of the most basic and important questions of human exis-
tence. The title of the present article makes our position on
this question a matter of little suspense, but to make the
reasons for that position clear and hopefully compelling,
we must start by defining what we mean by a conscious
mental process and an automatic mental process. The de-
fining features of what we are referring to as a conscious
process have remained consistent and stable for over 100
years (see Bargh & Chartrand, in press): These are mental
acts of which we are aware, that we intend (i.e., that we
start by an act of will), that require effort, and that we can
control (i.e., we can stop them and go on to something else
if we choose; Logan & Cowan, 1984). In contrast, there has
been no consensus on the features of a single form of
automatic process (Bargh, 1994); instead two major strains
have been identified and studied over the past century,
similar only in that they do not possess all of the defining
features of a conscious process (see Bargh, 1996; Bargh &
Chartrand, in press; Wegner & Bargh, 1998).
First, research on skill acquisition focused on inten-
tional, goal-directed processes that became more efficient
over time and practice until they could operate without
conscious guidance (see J. R. Anderson, 1983; Jastrow,
1906; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977; Smith & Lerner, 1986).
These were intentional but effortless mental processes.
Second, research on the initial perceptual analysis or en-
coding of environmental events (called "preattentive" or
"preconscious" processing) showed that much of this anal-
’ The existence of dominant, overarching perspectives concerning
free will and self-determination does not mean, of course, that everyone
working within a given perspective adheres to its dominant assumption. A
notable exception within cognitive psychology is the approach of Varela,
Thompson, and Rosch (1991), who argue that higher-order phenomena
such as free will and the self are the result of a complex interaction
between the mind and the world, and hence cannot be satisfactorily
explained through mechanism alone.
July 1999 American Psychologist 463