Catching nonconscious goals in the act of decision making

•We examine if goals activated automatically can be reported by decision makers.•We activate goals via subliminal and supraliminal priming.•We assess goal activation during the choice process when goals are most active.•Our experiments show that automatically activated goals are reportable.•Automatically activated goals can be reported if assesses at the right time.

Research has consistently found that goals triggered by environmental cues can influence decision making processes outside of conscious awareness. This lack of awareness led naturally to the presumption that decision makers could not report the activation level of nonconsciously primed goals. This paper shows that goal activation levels can be reported, so long as the report is made during the decision process on a continuous goal activation scale. These results indicate that default lack of awareness is less a limitation of the cognitive system and more a function of the method used to recover goals during a decision process.