Consciousness and Control

As research on unconscious processes in personality and social psychology increases, there is a danger that disparate phenomena will be confused with each other, and that characteristics of particular unconscious processes will be over generalized. In order to reduce this danger, a simple framework for describing unconscious phenomena is presented. It focuses on the related issues of consciousness and control. The framework was developed to clarify the theoretical status of spontaneous trait inferences, so that research is reviewed first. Then the framework is described, applied to spontaneous trait inferences, and further illustrated by using it to characterize automatic construct activation and mindlessness.