Priming: Manipulating Your Consciousness...

Imagine that before an important exam at university you are sitting in the corridor waiting for the door to the lecture hall to open. And then a person sits down next to you and starts a conversation with you on some abstract topic. For example, about how great it is to be a teacher at a university, to do research and help students become professionals. Or, for example, about how cool it is to be a football fan, to blow the horn and throw bottles from the stands, and after the match to drink beer and start fights with fans of other teams. He discusses this with you for literally three minutes, then leaves... and in another quarter or half an hour the exam begins. Do you think that this three-minute conversation could have influenced your results on the exam? Experience shows that he could. In a psychological experiment where a group of students was randomly divided into two parts, and one half was asked to think about the work of a professor at a university, and the other - about the life of a football fan, the results were ultimately different. Students from the first group answered an average of 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 consciousness. What is priming and how does it work In the early 20th century, the goalkeeper of the Czech national team František Planička was famous for his ability to confidently block penalties even from the best scorers. When a penalty was called against him, he, as if in disappointment, tore his cap off his head, threw it into the goal and took his position. Nine times out of ten, the opposing team's footballer kicked exactly the corner of the goal where the cap flew. From a psychological perspective, this is a classic example of priming. At the end of the 20th century, psychologists discovered something quite interesting. If two events follow one another, the impressions of the first event greatly influence your attitude towards the second, even if these events are not logically connected. One of the most famous experiments in the field of priming was as follows: people were asked to write down the last two digits of their passport number on a piece of paper, or to spin a roulette wheel and write down the number that came up. After that, they were shown some product (a toy, an electrical appliance, etc.) and asked to name the most likely price at which this product is sold in a supermarket. It turned out that the numbers written down by the participant in the first part of the experiment often appeared in the second part. If the roulette wheel came up with the number 14, then five minutes later the person would say that a teddy bear should cost $14 in the store – and the person who came up with the number 8 would assume that the same teddy bear should cost $8 and not a cent more. There is no logic to this – it is just that previous experience influenced subsequent experience. Returning to the example with the conversation before the exam – the students from the first group were prompted to think about an intelligent person, solving complex problems, successful in the academic field, and these thoughts set the participants of the experiment for intellectual work. And the students from the first group were set up to think about anti-intellectual, slacker actions – and they went to the exam in this mood. Conscious and unconscious priming Priming can be conscious or unconscious. Or, in other words, conscious or unconscious. It is possible to control people's behavior in a choice situation by means of preliminary preparation using rational arguments. This is often done, for example, by lawyers, gradually leading the judge or jury to the desired opinion. Many examples on this topic can be found in the court speeches of the famous Russian lawyer Plevako. For example, when one shopkeeper was being tried for not closing her store after the appointed time (as required by law) on the eve of a religious holiday, Plevako arrived in the courtroom a little late, and in response to the judge's remark said: "Your Honor, is it twenty minutes past ten on your watch? And only five minutes on mine. And you, Mr. Prosecutor? A quarter past ten? And the secretary's?" After the judge was convinced that everyone's watches showed different times, Plevako closed the case with just one phrase: "If we - responsible, educated, important people - cannot set our watches accurately, then are we really going to convict a simple shopkeeper for the same thing?" There is unconscious priming, when a person is not aware either before or after that he was influenced. Hardly one of the hundred football players who had to shoot at Planička's goal would believe that the goalkeeper's cap thrown at him controlled his behavior. Unconscious priming can be done by selecting words or pictures that evoke the associations the manipulator needs in the victim's brain. Priming controls choice Imagine that there are two projects, one of which guarantees an 80% probability of success, while the other has a 20% risk of failure. Which of these projects would you prefer to invest money in or get a job in? If you are not a mathematician, you will almost certainly choose the first option. Although in fact, the projects are equivalent - both have an 80% probability of success and a 20% probability of failure. However, because the first example used the word "success" and the second used the words "risk" and "failure," the first option is associated with something good and the second with something bad. Priming Controls Intelligence I already told you about an experiment today where a student's problem-solving ability was strengthened or weakened by just an innocuous conversation about the life of a professor or the life of a football fan. Here's an even more cruel experiment: At a university, they identified students who came from a problematic group. Blacks, people with criminal records, former drug addicts, etc. And they divided them into two groups. One simply took written exams, and the students from the second group were asked by the teacher before the exam, "You're from Harlem (was in prison, used to take drugs), right?" - and only then did he give them sheets of paper with the assignment. The second group did much worse on the exam assignments, and it didn't matter at all what subject the exam was in. A reminder of the student's unfavorable 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 offered 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 experiment participants were given cards with emotional, aggressive words ("killer", "war"), and the other half - 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 who was asked to be evaluated, or 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, here too, people were divided into two groups, one of which was given sentences to complete that included words associated with old age (“old man,” “cane,” “decrepit,” “elderly”), while the other half was given similar sentences with neutral words. Thus, the first group was given the sentence “An old man crosses the street at the crosswalk,” while the second group was given the sentence “A man crosses the street at the crosswalk.” When people were released from the classroom after 15 minutes, the first group walked down the hall to the front door much more slowly than the second group, although they had been moving at the same speed before the experiment. Priming Manages Interest Another study on priming showed that if a person watches two videos in a row – a TV program on economics and a speech by a presidential candidate – the viewer pays more attention to the economic aspects of the politician’s speech. However, if the economics program is replaced with a crime newsreel, attention will shift to the part of the politician’s speech where he talks about the rule of law. If the replacement is a film about terrorism, then when watching the politician’s speech, the viewer’s attention will shift to discussions about national security. And so on. In the same way, you can make people notice certain details in a big picture by first talking to them about blue butterflies or red apples – accordingly, the first person will notice more blue elements in the picture, and the second – more red ones. How to protect yourself from priming First of all, it is important to understand that priming itself cannot make you do something unnatural. It is impossible to make you eat a nail or change your sexual orientation with the help of priming. Rather, priming allows you to tip the scales in the direction the manipulator wants in situations where you can make a choice between A and B, and both options are natural and acceptable for you - buy a girl flowers or chocolate, interrupt a conversation with colleagues or wait for it to end, walk down the hall quickly or slowly, go on vacation to Paris or London. If you want to sell more French wine, put French chanson in the supermarket, if you want to sell more Italian wine, play Celentano songs. So there is no need to be overly afraid of priming. But if you have reason to believe that you are being exposed to its influence somewhere, and you would like to protect yourself from this manipulation, then remember that the main key here is awareness and thoughtfulness. Therefore, if you suspect that you are being manipulated with the help of priming, do a simple thing. Postpone making a decision for a while. And then think over everything that concerns 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.