The Role of Mindlessness in a Typical Social Psychological Experiment

An experiment, offered as a methodological prototype, was conducted to assess whether subjects in a typical, successful social psychological experiment pick up cues planted by experimenters and then proceed relatively mindlessly with the task at hand. The Asch/Kelley experiment was used to test this hypothesis. Subjects were tested on recall of information they had just been given. As predicted, subjects who were mindless with respect to this information were more likely to confirm the Asch/Kelley prediction than disconfirm it, while there was no difference in confirmation for the mindful group. The implications of these results for our ability to generalize our findings from the laboratory to the nonlaboratory world were discussed.