John Bargh

John A. Bargh is an American social psychologist at Yale University, where he founded the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation laboratory. His work examines automaticity and unconscious processing in social behavior, including whether behavior thought to be under deliberate control instead results from automatic reactions to outside stimuli such as words. He is particularly known for research on priming, including a widely cited study reporting that participants exposed to words associated with old age subsequently walked more slowly when leaving the laboratory than participants exposed to neutral words; later attempts to replicate this and related priming findings have failed to find significant effects, and the original result is now a central example in psychology's replication crisis.