The Relation Between Perception and Behavior, or …

1 Journal of Personality and Social PsychologyIW8, Vol. 74, No. 4, 865-877 Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Relation Between Perception and Behavior, or How to Win a Game of Trivial PursuitAp Dijksterhuis and Ad van KnippenbergUniversity of NijmegenThe authors tested and confirmed the hypothesis that priming a stereotype or trait leads to complexovert behavior in line with this activated stereotype or trait. Specifically, 4 experiments establishedthat priming the stereotype of professors or the trait intelligent enhanced participants' performanceon a scale measuring general knowledge.

2 Also, priming the stereotype of soccer hooligans or thetrait stupid reduced participants' performance on a general knowledge scale. Results of the experi-ments revealed (a) that prolonged priming leads to more pronounced behavioral effects and (b) thatthere is no sign of decay of the effects for at least 15 min. The authors explain their results byclaiming that Perception has a direct and pervasive impact on overt behavior (cf. J. A. Bargh, , & L. Burrows, 1996). Implications for human social behavior are am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, notthinking.

3 Christopher IsherwoodSome time ago, a few members of the Department of SocialPsychology of the University of Nijmegen visited a soccer they had parked their car, they walked the remaining mileto the stadium. The psychologists, behaving calmly and orderlyas ever, were surrounded by hundreds of soccer fans and hooli-gans, many of whom were yelling and shouting. After sometime, one of the members of the department engaged in some-what unusual behavior . He saw an empty beer can, and, in whatseemed to be an impulsive act, he kicked it as far away aspossible.

4 During the next few minutes, he and a slightly embar-rassed colleague pondered on possible explanation is that, upon seeing soccer hooligans, onemay without being aware of it -start to act like them. Thatis, the activation of the representation of soccer hooligans leadsto the tendency to behave similarly. Recent research showed thatthis is indeed possible. The mere Perception of a person or agroup of persons triggers a mechanism producing the tendencyto behave correspondingly. In a series of studies, Bargh, Chen,and Burrows (1996) demonstrated such unconscious and unin-tentional effects of Perception on social behavior .

5 It was estab-lished that priming someone with a trait ( , rudeness) ora stereotype ( , elderly, African American) indeed leads toAp Dijksterhuis and Ad van Knippenberg, Department of Social Psy-chology, University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen, the research was facilitated by a Royal Netherlands Academy ofSciences fellowship awarded to Ap Dijksterhuis. We thank the manycolleagues who gave us valuable advice during conferences at whichwe presented these concerning this article should be addressed to ApDijksterhuis, Department of Social Psychology, University of Nijmegen, Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

6 Electronic mailmay be sent to in line with the activated constructs (see also Carver,Ganellen, Froming, & Chambers, 1983; Neuberg, 1988). Forexample, priming participants with the stereotype of the elderlymade participants walk more slowly than participants who werenot primed (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996, Experiment 2).In our view, the notion that behavior is under direct perceptualcontrol is of central importance for the understanding of humanbehavior. After all, upon meeting someone, one usually makesseveral categorizations instantly. One infers personality traitsfrom the behavior of others spontaneously (Winter & Uleman,1984).

7 One activates stereotypes automatically (Devine, 1989).Hence, it is not immoderate to conclude that social interactionusually involves the activation of trait constructs and stereo-types. In this light, the findings of Bargh, Chen, and Burrows(1996), establishing that people's actions are unintentionallyaffected by these activated traits and stereotypes, do warrantfurther the present research, we want to make two , we address the question of whether the effects of percep-tion on behavior are confined to relatively simple actions orwhether one can also evoke more complex behavioral patternsthis way.

8 Second, we explore the parameters of the Perception - behavior link. Specifically, we study the Relation Between thestrength of the prime and the strength of the resulting behavioraleffect. Furthermore, we investigate the decay function of theeffects of Perception on should be noted in advance that throughout this article,we use the term Perception rather loosely. The object of investi-gation is Perception , or the activation of perceptual representa-tions. In our research, as well as in most of the research wediscuss and in most social cognition research in general, theresearcher does not activate representations ( , a stereotype)by presenting participants with the real object of Perception ( , a group member).

9 Instead, the researcher uses primingmanipulations to activate these perceptual , for the sake of simplicity, receiving priming (includingthe somewhat unorthodox priming manipulations we use) istreated as functionally equivalent to Perception . We realize, how-865866 DUKSTERHUIS AND VAN KNIPPENBERG ever, that our priming procedures do not literally reflect socialperception processes, Perception and Overt BehaviorThe notion that Perception (or the activation of a perceptualrepresentation) may lead to corresponding overt behavior hasbeen recognized since long ago by some of our most influentialthinkers (see, , Arnold, 1946; Charcot, 1886; James, 1890;Koffka, 1925; Piaget, 1946).

10 Underlying this idea is the assump-tion that apart from perceptual or cognitive representations ( ,traits, stereotypes), behaviors are mentally represented as welland that these perceptual and behavioral representations aresomehow intimately linked. Indeed, many theorists ( , Bargh,in press; Berkowitz, 1984; Carver & Scheier, 1981; Mischel,1973; Schank & Abelson, 1977; Vallacher, 1993) have discussedthis possibility. Prinz (1990), in a review of the research on the"common coding" hypothesis, explained why mere perceptioncan affect overt behavior relatively easily:Acts are completely commensurate and continuous with and acts both refer to events with comparable are characterized by location (in space and time) and contents(in terms of physical and non-physical properties), the only differ-ence being that percepts refer to ongoing, actor-independent eventsand acts to to-be-generated, actor-dependent events, (pp.)