Automatic Evaluation

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 18, No. 6, pg. 362-366.

Melissa J. Ferguson and Vivian Zayas

Humans continuously evaluate aspects of their environment (people, objects, places) in an automatic fashion (i.e., unintentionally, rapidly). Such evaluations can be highly adaptive, triggering behavioral responses away from threats and toward rewards in the environment. Even in the absence of immediate threats and fleeting rewards, the ability to automatically evaluate aspects of the environment enables individuals to effortlessly make sense of their world without depleting limited and valuable cognitive resources. We discuss two lines of research on automatic evaluation: The first demonstrates that people can evaluate a stimulus even when they are not conscious of the stimulus and thus unaware of having evaluated it. The second line of work shows that even when people are conscious of a stimulus, they may evaluate it without intending to do so. We end by discussing current theoretical questions regarding this topic.

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