John Bargh

John A. Bargh (; born 1955) is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory. Bargh's work focuses on automaticity and unconscious processing as a method to better understand social behavior, as well as philosophical topics such as free will. Much of Bargh's work investigates whether behaviors thought to be under volitional control may result from automatic interpretations of and reactions to external stimuli, such as words.

Bargh is particularly famous for his research on priming and its effects on behavior. In one of his most well-known studies, Bargh and colleagues reported that participants who were exposed to words related to the elderly stereotype (e.g., "Florida", "Bingo") subsequently walked more slowly when exiting the laboratory, compared to participants who were exposed to neutral words. This study has been highly influential, with over 5,000 citations. However, attempts to replicate Bargh's studies have failed to find significant effects,. So far, there has been a lack of successful preregistered replication studies, and the only support for priming effects come from several large-scale meta-analyses which can not adequately control for the substantial bias in this literature.