The Nonconscious Road to Perceptions of Performance: Achievement Priming Augments Outcome Expectancies and Experienced Self-Agency

Ruud Custers , Henk Aarts , Masanori Oikawa , Andrew Elliot

Three experiments explored the effects of priming the achievement concept on the expectation of performance outcomes and experiences of self-agency over outcomes in a task in which performance outcomes were dependent on chance. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that achievement priming produced expectations of higher (more successful) outcomes prior to working on the task, regardless of whether priming was subliminal (nonconscious) or supraliminal (conscious) and that this effect could not be attributed to subjective motivation to perform well. Experiment 3 revealed that subliminal achievement priming decreased participants' experienced self-agency when outcome feedback was low, but increased self-agency when it was high. Together, these results suggest that activating achievement concepts outside of awareness spontaneously triggers expectations of higher task outcomes, which increases or decreases self-agency depending on whether there is a match or mismatch with observed outcomes. Implications for the literature on achievement-priming effects on behavior are discussed.

Mots clés: Authorship; Unconscious; Causality; Expectancies; Priming; Achievement; Goals; Success; Failure

Domaines: Psychologie et comportements

Ruud Custers, Henk Aarts, Masanori Oikawa, Andrew Elliot. The Nonconscious Road to Perceptions of Performance: Achievement Priming Augments Outcome Expectancies and Experienced Self-Agency. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2009, 45 (6), pp.1200. ⟨10.1016/j.jesp.2009.07.013⟩. ⟨hal-00722664⟩