Abstract

needs appear to influence all stages of the information-processing sequence, namely, perception, representation, and a variety of mental operations, such as inference gen-eration and memory, thereby altering behavior, emotion, judgment, and problem solving (see Förster & Denzler, 2006, in press; Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996). In recent years, social cognition researchers also have made tremendous progress in understanding the extent to which judgment and behavior are guided without inten-tion or awareness (for reviews, see Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Förster & Liberman, 2007). Most notably, demon-strations of what has been described as automatic goal pursuit or implicit volition (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai,