Test Yourself: Another Trap of Consciousness - Priming

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Priming is one of the most interesting ways to manipulate your mind.

Imagine that before an important exam at the university you are sitting in the corridor, waiting for the moment when the door to the classroom will open. And then a person sits down with you, who starts a conversation with you on some abstract topic. For example, how great it is to be a teacher at a university, to do scientific work, and to help students become professionals. Or, for example, how fun it is to be a football fan, play the pipe and throw bottles from the stands, and after the match drink beer and start fights with fans of other teams.

He discusses this with you literally three minutes, then leaves … and after another quarter of an hour or half an hour the exam begins. Do you think this three-minute conversation could have influenced your results on the exam? Practice shows that as much as I could.

In a psychological experiment in which a group of students were randomly divided into two parts, and one half was asked to think about the work of a professor at the university, and the other about the life of a football fan, the results were different. Students from the first group answered on average 56% of the exam questions, and students from the second - only 43% of the questions. This is the difference between a passed and a failed exam.

This is how priming works - one of the most interesting ways to manipulate your mind.

What is priming and how does it work

At the beginning of the 20th century, the goalkeeper of the Czech national team František Planíčka was famous for his ability to confidently beat off penalties even from the best scorers. When a penalty was appointed at his gate, he, as if out of chagrin, tore off the cap from his head, threw it into the gate and took up his position. Nine times out of ten, the opponent's footballer hit exactly the corner of the goal where the cap flew away.

Psychologically speaking, this is a classic example of priming.

At the end of the 20th century, psychologists discovered a rather curious thing. If any two events follow one after the other, the impressions of the first event greatly influence your attitude to the second, even if these events are not logically connected with each other.

One of the most famous priming experiments involved asking people to write the last two digits of their passport number on a piece of paper, or spin a tape measure and write down the number that comes up. After that, they were shown a product (toy, electrical appliance, etc.) and asked them to name the most probable price at which this product is sold in the supermarket.

It turned out that the numbers recorded by the participant in the first part of the experiment often appeared in the second part. If the number 14 fell on the roulette wheel, then five minutes later the person said that the teddy bear should cost $ 14 in the store - and the person who got the number 8 assumed that the same bear should be worth $ 8 and not a cent more.

There is no logic in this - just the previous experience influenced the subsequent one.

Returning to the example with the conversation before the exam, students from the first group were pushed to think about an intelligent person, solving complex problems, successful in the academic field, and these thoughts set the participants in the experiment to intellectual work. And students from the first group were tuned in to thoughts about anti-intellectual, doltish actions - and they went to the exam in this very mood.

Priming conscious and unconscious

Priming can be conscious or unconscious. Or, in other words, conscious or unconscious.

It is possible to control the behavior of people in a situation of choice through preliminary preparation with the help of rational arguments. This, for example, is often done by lawyers, gradually leading the judge or jury to the right opinion. Many examples on this topic can be found in the court statements of the famous Russian lawyer Plevako.

For example, when one merchant was tried for not closing the store after the due time on the eve of a religious holiday (as required by law), Plevako came to the courtroom with a slight delay, and in response to the judge's remark said: “You have on your watch, Your Honor, twenty minutes past ten? And on mine only five minutes. And what about you, Mr. Prosecutor? Quarter ten? And the secretary? " After the judge made sure that everyone's clocks showed different times, Plevako closed the case with just one phrase: “If we - responsible, educated, important people - cannot set our clocks exactly, then will we really condemn the simple shopkeeper?"

There is unconscious priming, when a person, neither before nor after, does not realize that he has been influenced. Hardly one of the hundreds of footballers who have had the chance to shoot at Planichka's goal would have believed that the goalkeeper's thrown cap controlled his behavior.

Unconscious priming can be carried out with the help of a selection of words or pictures that evoke associations in the victim's brain that the manipulator needs.

Priming rules the choice

Imagine that there are two projects, one of which has an 80% chance of success, and the other has a 20% risk of failure. In which of these projects would you prefer to invest or get a job?

If you are not a mathematician, then you will almost certainly choose the first option.

Although in fact the projects are equivalent - in both there is an 80% probability of success and a 20% probability of failure. However, due to the fact that in the first case the word "success" was used, and in the second - the words "risk" and "failure", the first option is associated more with something good, and the second - with something bad.

Priming rules intelligence

I’ve already talked about an experiment today where a student’s ability to solve problems was enhanced or weakened by just an innocuous conversation about the life of a professor or the life of a football fan. And here's an even more brutal experiment:

The university singled out students who came out of some problem group. Blacks, people with convictions, former drug addicts, etc. And they divided them into two groups. One simply passed the written exams, and before the exam, the teacher asked students from the second group, "You are from Harlem (you were in prison, used to take drugs), right?" - and only after that he gave out the sheets with the assignment.

The second group performed much worse on the exam tasks, and it did not matter at all what subject the exam was in. The reminder of a dysfunctional past instantly switched the student's brain to thoughts about his problems, shortcomings and weaknesses, and this undermined his self-confidence, and as a result, the ability to solve problems.

Priming controls aggression

In another well-known experiment, people were first asked to play a game where they had to pull out cards with different words from a deck and lay them out on the playing field, and then, in the second part of the experiment, the same people were asked to express their opinion about one of the politicians. However, half of the participants in the experiment were given cards with emotional, aggressive words (“killer”, “war”), and the other half were given cards with neutral words (“weather”, “move”).

As a result, the statements of those people who were shown cards with emotional words turned out to be much more aggressive, harsh and evaluative than the statements of those people who took out neutral cards in the game. Although the game had nothing to do with the politician whom it was proposed to evaluate, and even with politics in general.

Priming controls well-being

Even more interesting is an experiment in which people were asked to complete sentences with individual words removed for 15 minutes. However, even here people were divided into two groups, one of which was allowed to complete phrases that included words related to old age ("old man", "cane", "decrepit", "elderly") - and the other half were offered similar phrases with neutral words.

Thus, the first group was asked to complete the phrase "An old man crosses the street on a pedestrian _", while the second group received the phrase "A man crosses the street on a pedestrian _".

When, after 15 minutes, people were released from the audience, the representatives of the first group walked along the corridor to the front door much more slowly than the representatives of the second - although they moved at the same speed before the start of the experiment.

Priming drives interest

Another study on priming showed that if a person watches two videos in a row - a TV program on economics and a speech of a presidential candidate - the viewer pays more attention to economic aspects in a politician's speech.

However, if you replace the economics curriculum with a criminal chronicle, attention will shift to the part of the politician's speech where he talks about the rule of law. If a film about terrorism acts as a substitute, then when watching a politician's speech, the viewer's attention will go to discussions about national security. Etc.

In the same way, you can make people notice certain details in a large picture, having previously talked with them about blue butterflies or about red apples - accordingly, the first person will notice more blue elements in the picture, and the second - red ones.

How to protect yourself from priming

First things first, it's important to understand that priming alone cannot force you to do something unnatural. It is impossible to force you to eat a nail or change your sexual orientation with the help of priming.

Rather, priming allows you to make a choice between A and B in situations where you can make a choice between A and B, and both options are natural and acceptable to you - buy flowers or chocolate for a girl, interrupt a conversation with colleagues or wait for it to end, walk down the corridor quickly or slowly, to go on vacation to Paris or London - to tip the scales in the direction necessary for the manipulator.

If you want to sell more French wine - put French chanson in the supermarket, if you want to sell more Italian wine - play Celentano's songs.

So you shouldn't be afraid of priming too much. But if you have reason to believe that somewhere you are exposed to it, and you would like to protect yourself from this manipulation, then remember that the main key here is awareness and thoughtfulness.

Therefore, if you have a suspicion that I am manipulating you with the help of priming, do a simple thing. Postpone the decision for a while. And then consider everything about your choice from the very beginning, focusing only on this problem and not being distracted by others.

The recipe is simple - but it really works.