User:ReeganBonar/sandbox

=Automaticity's Influences Everyday Social Behaviour= Automaticity[1] is an innate human feature, in which individuals carry out actions without being conscious of them. These automatic behaviours are triggered by the individual’s company and environment. Automatic behaviours can affect how individuals act during social situations and the way they behave in their environment. An individual may not be aware of the prime, their behaviour, or the link between the prime and their behaviour.[2]

The Four Horsemen of Automaticity
For an action to be considered automatic, at least one of these four features must be present.[3]

Awareness: Individuals are not aware they are conducting certain behaviours.

Intentionality: Individuals are not consciously choosing to conduct certain behaviours.

Efficiency: The behaviour does not require extensive mental processing.

Controllability: Individuals cannot control the behaviour and it cannot be changed once started.

Interpersonal Mimicry
An example of automaticity in everyday life is the “chameleon effect.”[4] This is when an individual automatically mimics the gestures, posture, tone of the engaged individual. A suggested purpose of this is encourage a positive relationship between both individuals, promoting social behaviour, or that the mimicker wants to familiarize themselves with the other individual.

Stereotyping
Individuals may be primed in a way that it affects judgments of others.[5] Police officers were primed with either words associated with African-Americans or neutral words. Then officers were given a hypothetical crime in which race or motives were not stated. Officers who were exposed to the “African-American words” reported the crimes as being more severe and recommended harsher punishments i.e. longer jail sentences, than the neutral words. This could impact everyday life as surroundings or primes can impact judgments and first impressions of others.

Advertising
Priming can also influence automatic eating behaviours.[6] Both children and adults primed with TV advertisements promoting high calorie snacks ate up to 45% more compared to controls, even though participants reported these impulse were not due to hunger. It is likely that adverting companies use automaticity to manipulate consumer’s choice in their favour.

Honesty
Automaticity can even effect how honest you will be in everyday life.[7] When participants were primed with religious themed words compared to neutral words, they cheated significantly less in an honesty task (circle test [8]). Interestingly, these results were found even if participants reported having no religious beliefs. This could be used to promote honesty in certain situations, such as court oaths or exam like setting to discourage cheating.