John Bargh
The ACME lab researches the unconscious or implicit influences on social judgment, motivation, and behavior. Most recently this research has focused on embodied cognition effects, or influences of physical experiences (such as cleansing one’s hands, holding something warm or rough) on metaphorically related social variables (physical warmth leading to feelings of physical warmth, for example). One interesting new line of this research has focused on how social goals and political attitudes can be influenced by satisfaction of underlying physical-level motivations; for example, immunization against the flu virus influences attitudes towards immigration (as ‘invaders’ of one’s ‘cultural body’), and feelings of physical safety reduce one’s need to feel ‘socially safe’ as after rejection or other ‘cold’ social experiences.