Does self-consciousness increase or decrease priming effects? It depends

Self-consciousness has been shown to both increase and decrease the magnitude of prime-to-behavior effects. In this paper, we decouple the facets of self-consciousness into internal state awareness and self-reflectiveness and show that self-consciousness can be associated with multiple influences on automatic behavior. Specifically, we conducted an experiment demonstrating that increased internal state awareness decreased the magnitude of the prime-to-behavior effect, whereas increased self-reflectiveness amplified the effect. These effects operated independently of self-monitoring and suggest a multiple process approach to understanding prime-to-behavior effects.