John Bargh

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema Professor of Psychology and Professor of Cognitive Science and of Management

John Bargh, BS, University of Illinois; PhD, University of Michigan; professor at Yale since 2003, after a long career at NYU: You are an award-winning social psychologist and among the world’s leading experts on the unconscious mind. In the lab you lead at Yale, and in over 200 publications of every kind—monographs, edited collections, journal articles, and handbooks—you have devoted your career to the fascinating question of how our minds work. You have illuminated the unconscious ways in which our environmental surroundings and social cues cause us to think, feel, and behave.

Your revolutionary research into unconscious priming culminated in the publication of your book Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do, called one of the best works of 2017 by the Financial Times and one of the best science books of the year by Business Insider. Although the book is infused with decades of rigorous study and laboratory experiments, readers have found it eminently accessible and infused with your particular wit, humor, common sense, and charm. You have brought these qualities as well to your mentoring and your undergraduate and graduate student teaching, particularly in your well-regarded large lecture course, The Modern Unconscious.

In honor of all your contributions to psychology, you have received most of the other honors bestowed on investigators in your field of study, including the Distinguished Career Award from the American Psychological Association. You are one of only two people in that society’s more than fifty-year history to have won both its top dissertation award at the beginning of your career and its distinguished scientist award at the culmination of your career.

It is no surprise to anyone that, although you are formally retiring, you plan to continue your investigation of the human mind. You are now working on a book about conscious experience, meant to complement your first book’s focus on unconscious processes. And, true to the category-disruption that is part of your nature, you have been assisting an artificial intelligence firm in Los Angeles that is studying how much their work on machine intelligence overlaps with and differs from human consciousness and cognition. As you retire from active teaching and Yale life, your colleagues, in what they believe is their full consciousness, thank you and wish you many more years of exploring the illimitable mysteries of the human mind.