Tag: Priming

The Environment of the Moment

The Environment of the Moment

Posted on by jabittan
“The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy.”

 

Daniel Kahneman includes the above quote in his book Thinking Fast and Slow when recapping his chapter about anchoring effects. The quote highlights the surprising and conflicting reality of research on priming and anchoring effects. The research shows that our minds are not always honest with us, or at least are not capable of consciously recognizing everything taking place within them. Seemingly meaningless cues in our environment can influence a great deal of what takes place within our brains. We can become more defensive, likely to donate more to charity, and more prone to think certain thoughts by symbols, ideas, and concepts present in our environment.

 

We all accept that when we are hungry, when our allergies are overwhelming, and when we are frustrated from being cut-off on the freeway that our behaviors will be changed. We know these situations will make us less patient, more likely to glare at someone who didn’t mean to offend us, and more likely to grab a donut for breakfast because we are not in the mood for flavor-lacking oatmeal. But somehow, even though we know external events are influencing our internal thinking and decision-making, this still seems to be in our conscious control in one way or another. A hearty breakfast, a few allergy pills, and a few deep breaths to calm us down are all we need to get back to normal and be in control of our minds and behavior.

 

It is harder to accept that our minds, moods, generosity, behavior towards others, and stated beliefs could be impacted just as easily by factors that we don’t even notice. We see some type of split between being short with someone because we are hungry, and being short with someone because an advertisement on our way to work primed us to be more selfish. We don’t believe that we will donate more to charity when the charity asks for a $500 dollar donation rather than a $50 dollar donation. In each of these situations our conscious and rational brain produces an explanation for our behavior that is based on observations the conscious mind can make. We are not aware of the primes and anchors impacting our behavior, so consciously we don’t believe they have any impact on us at all.

 

Nevertheless, research shows that our minds are not as independent and controllable as we subjectively believe. Kahneman’s quote shows that traditional understandings of free-will fall down when faced by research on priming and anchoring effects. We don’t like to admit that random and seemingly innocuous cues in the environment of the moment shape us because doing so threatens the narratives and stories we want to believe about who we are, why we do the things we do, and how our society is built. It is scary, possibly upsetting, and violates basic understandings of who we are, but it is accurate and important to accept if we want to behave and perform better in our lives.
Money Priming

Money Priming

Posted on by jabittan
An idea I have been a little obsessed with for the last several months is the importance of community in the lives of human beings. We are social creatures, and we depend on social structures for support, connection, joy, and meaning. During the Pandemic, we have had to face an absence of community, pulling back even more from the social groups and settings of our lives. America was already isolated in many ways, and I am worried for the long-term consequences of what we will lose in terms of community from this Pandemic.

 

One reason why the United States has dealt with diminishing senses of community may be related to our pursuit of wealth. Our culture values money and success so much that we elected a man with no political experience, with a history of bankruptcy, but with extraordinary bravado around his personal wealth to be our president. We elected President Trump because many of us wanted to feel a sense of greater wealth, or at least a possibility of greater financial success, and liked the ways in which he represented those ideas.

 

(I will pause for a minute to note that I think the president is reprehensible and I am glad I did not and never will vote for him. I also want to recognize that I am viewing supporters of the president in the general sense, applying a more positive lens toward them than others might. I recognize and understand that many of his supporters have dangerous and disgusting racial views that should be abhorred, but I also recognize that many of his supporters generally don’t think about politics much and like the presentation of wealth and the possibility of wealth that he presents.)

 

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman presents information about how money priming impacts our brains. Factors related to money seem to trigger specific responses and behaviors in people. As he writes, “The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.” Money, in other words, works against community.

 

Individualism itself is not terrible. I don’t know where the balance should lie between community and individualism, and I feel myself pulled in separate directions regarding both. However, I believe it is our connections to each other and our shared goals and purposes that will help us feel a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Living in suburban homes (as I do), parking in our garages, and withdrawing into our homes to stream shows (also guilty!) is individualistic and exclusionary. It doesn’t help us have meaningful relationships with our friends, families, neighbors, and fellow citizens. It doesn’t help us work toward shared goals, doesn’t help us develop sustainable futures, and doesn’t help us better understand each other.

 

We need more community in our lives to tackle major problems in our society. Unfortunately, America is committed to ideas of wealth creation to an extent that limits our ability to build the community we need. Money priming influences how we behave in relation to each other, and it is not helping rebuild the communities that we have allowed to atrophy over the decades.
Autonomous Actors

Autonomous Actors

Posted on by jabittan
“We now know that the effects of priming can reach into every corner of our lives.” Daniel Kahneman writes this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow while demonstrating the power of priming factors. An example he uses in the book to demonstrate the power of priming has to do with voting and school support. A study from Arizona showed that people are more likely to support ballot propositions to increase school funding when their polling place is in a school. The difference between supporting the proposition or not was greater for people voting within a school building versus those who voted elsewhere than the difference was between parents of school aged children and non-parents. Simply where we happen to cast our ballot is not something most of us would consider to be a big influencing factor in our preference for school funding, but it is. We are not the autonomous actors that we like to believe we are.

 

Priming factors influence a lot of our behaviors, often without our awareness. In the past I wrote about priming and creativity and the power of our environment from research that Richard Wiseman presented in his book 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot. Small factors in our environment can change our emotional valance and can influence how creative we are, even if we don’t notice those factors directly. What our brains are doing is sometimes under our control, like when we focus on writing, doing math problems, or skiing downhill, but even then, our performance and ability can be influenced by things external to our brain that seemingly have no significance to our lives or the task at hand.

 

This raises the question about how autonomous we are, how much self-control and self-determination can we exercise, and whether there any potential for free will. The debates around free will are complex, and most people who study consciousness seem to be telling us that free will, at least as popularly conceptualized, cannot exist. Brain scans and studies show that an action potential builds up in the brain before we make a conscious decision to do something. Add to that the fact that priming studies show that the decisions we make are often influenced by factors beyond our immediate discretion, and we have to conclude that we do not have the kind of will, control, and autonomy that we typically perceive ourselves as having.

 

Kahneman writes, “Studies of priming effects have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices.” Our environments and the priming factors around us shape who we are and how we behave. Social norms and cues dictate our responses to many events. We don’t behave rationally and autonomously, we respond to stimuli and the world, and don’t have the control that we associate with the autonomous actors we believe ourselves to be.
Conscious and Unconscious Priming Effects

Conscious and Unconscious Priming Effects

Posted on by jabittan
“Another major advance in our understanding of memory was the discovery that priming is not restricted to concepts and words,” writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware.”

 

Yesterday I wrote about linguistic priming. How words can trigger thoughts in our mind, and set us up to think certain thoughts. I wrote about how ideas spread, like in the movie Inception from one thought or idea to another based on similarities and categories of things. I wrote about how important implicit associations can be, and how we have used them to measure racial bias and the harm that these biases could have in society. Today’s post continues on that trend, exploring the areas in our lives where priming may be taking place without our knowledge.

 

In his book, before the quote I shared at the start of this post, Kahneman describes our thoughts as behaving like ripples on a pond. A train of thought can be primed in one direction, and ripples from that priming can spread out across our mind. So when I used Inception earlier, I may have primed our minds to think about trains, since they feature so prominently in the movie, and if that is the case, it is no surprise that I used train of thought just a few sentences later. From this point forward, there are likely other metaphors and examples that I might use that are potentially primed by the movie Inception or by associations with trains. It is clear that I’m following priming effects if I directly reference my thinking staying on track or going off the rails, but it might be less obvious and clear how my thinking might relate to trains in the sentences to come, but as Kahneman’s quote suggested, my mind might be unconsciously primed for certain directions all from the casual mention of Inception from earlier.

 

Across my writing I have always been fascinated by the idea that we are not in as much control over our minds as we believe. Thoughts think themselves, we don’t necessarily think our own thoughts. Our minds can be influenced by time, by caffeine levels, by whether someone smiled at us on our commute to work, or whether our sock is rubbing on our foot in a strange way. We don’t have to think of anything for it to directly register with our brain and influence where our mind goes. What thoughts pop into our head, and what ripples of ideas are primed across our mind are beyond our control and influenced by things we sometimes barely notice. Priming, according to Kahneman, can be direct, deliberate, and conscious, or it can be unconscious and oblique. The mind and how we think is more random and unpredictable than it feels, and sometimes more random than we would like to believe. This should change how we think of ourselves, how we think of others, and what information and knowledge we privilege and encourage. It should make us less certain that we are always behaving as we should, and less certain that we are as smart and savvy in all situations as we like to believe we are.
Associative Thinking

Associative Thinking

Posted on by jabittan
I had a few linguistics classes in college and I remember really enjoying studies about associative thinking, or priming, where one word would trigger thoughts about another related thing. If you read stop sign, and someone then asked you to name a color, you are likely to say red. Our minds hover around a set of words associated with a topic, and words further away from the topic probably won’t register as quickly. If you read jellyfish then your mind is going to be set up for more ocean words like water, seaweed, or Nemo. Words like cactus, x-ray, or eviction, would take an extra second for your brain to register because they don’t seem to belong with jellyfish. If you watch Family Feud, then you will get to see great examples of linguistic priming and associative thinking in process. The first person in a family will say their answer, and it will be hard for the rest of the family to jump into a different category to get the final item on the list.

 

Associative thinking is even more interesting and complicated than just linguistic priming. Daniel Kahneman writes about it in his book Thinking Fast and Slow:

 

“An idea that has been activated does not merely evoke one other idea. It activates many ideas, which in turn activate others. Furthermore, only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most of the work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves. The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.”

 

Associative thinking reveals a lot about our minds that we don’t have access to. This is why implicit association tests (IAT) have been used to measure things like racial bias in individuals and societies. Your conscious mind might know it is wrong to think of people of color as criminals, but your unconscious mind might implicitly connect words like crime, drugs, or violence to certain racial groups. Even though you can consciously overcome these biases, your immediate reaction to other people might be enough to show them that you don’t trust them and might reveal implicit fears or negative biases. A clenching fist, a narrowing gaze, or an almost imperceptible backing away from someone might not be conscious, but might be enough for someone to register a sense of unease.

 

I don’t know enough about the benefits of racial bias training to say if it is effective in counteracting these implicit associations or immediate and unconscious reactions. I don’t know just how truly bad it is that we harbor such implicit associations, but I think it is important that we recognize they are there. It is important to know how the brain works, and important that we think about how much thinking takes place behind the scenes, without us recognizing it. Self-awareness and knowledge about associative thinking can help us understand just how we behave and interact with others, so that hopefully we can bring our best selves to the conversations and interactions we have with people who are different from us.
Creativity and our environment

Priming and Creativity

Posted on by jabittan
Continuing with the idea of priming, Richard Wiseman in his book 59 Seconds researches the work of Jens Forster from the International University Bremen in Germany.  Forster asked people to participate in simple creativity exercises in environments that were specifically controlled and measured.  Forster began with an activity to mentally prime individuals by asking them to think about a certain stereotype, and measuring their creative ideas.  Following his mental priming experiment Forster executed a visual priming experiment. As Wiseman explains,

 

“Forster asked participants to take a standard creativity task (“think of as  many uses for a brick as possible”) while seated in front of one of two specially created art prints .  The two prints were each about three feet square, almost identical and consisted of twelve large crosses against a light green background.  In one picture all of the crosses were dark green, while in the other print eleven were dark green and one was yellow.  The researchers speculated that the unconscious mind would perceive this single yellow cross as breaking away from its more conservative and conventional green cousins and that this would encourage more radical and creative thinking.  The results were astounding.  Even though the participants didn’t consciously notice the picture, those seated in front of the “creative” picture produced significantly more uses for the brick.  A panel of experts judged their responses as far more creative.  The message is clear: if you want to fast track a group or and individual to think more creatively, use the power of visual priming.”

 

I find this experiment and idea to be really inspiring.  I have created my own simple art prints and placed them around my desk at work to help me generate more creative ideas throughout the day.  Prior to reading Wiseman’s book and beginning to listen to podcasts like Debbie Millman’s Design Matters, I never thought of myself as creative, but Forster’s experiments shows that everyone can be creative, especially if we prime ourselves for creativity both mentally and visually.
The Power of Our Environment - Priming Effects

The Power of Our Environment

Posted on by jabittan
While discussing the influence of small cues on our thought process, Richard Wiseman in his book 59 Seconds reflects on several studies that show how our environment can shape our thoughts and actions.  Wiseman explains the impact of small cues and the affect known as priming.  Priming involves triggers that lead to particular actions or thoughts becoming more prevalent or likely to occur.  A sneeze is a primer for someone to say bless you, the word hot is a primer for the word dog, and the Family Feud tv show is an experiment in priming with a cue or phrase priming responses from contestants.

 

Wiseman explains ways in which many situations in our lives can be impacted by primers, “Put people in front of a computer wallpaper showing dollar symbols, and they behave in a more selfish and unfriendly way, giving less money to charity and sitting farther away from others.  Give interviewers a cup of iced coffee, and unknowingly they rate interviewees as colder and less pleasant.  Add a faint smell of cleaning fluid to the air, and people tidy up more thoroughly.  Put a briefcase on a table during a meeting and people become more competitive.  The evidence points to a little counting for a lot.”

 

I find the idea of priming and our environment as very interesting since subtleties can have such a big impact on our actions.  I think most people can understand the situation where you are trying to cut back on sweets, yet in the office break room you see a pink box, and suddenly sugary foods are the only thing you can focus on.  These small cues seem to have a large impact on our behavior, and they seem to put decisions and actions beyond our control.
Changing our behavior is difficult, and the study by Wiseman shows that there are ways in which we can use priming for positive results. We can manipulate our environment to produce specific changes in our behavior, and help us act in ways we would like.  I am currently working through Dave Ramsey’s book on household money management and financial freedom, The Total Money Makeover, and one thing that Ramsey mentions is the myth that we only need a greater will power to change our actions and to achieve the goals we want.  What Ramsey explains, and what Wiseman’s research backs up, is that we are all motivated to make smart decisions (in this case financially) but we do not have systems in place to help us do so.  In the case of priming, we could say that our environment is set up to make it easy for us to go into debt and spend money, especially since our culture and environment lacks primers that lead us to save money and work on budgeting.

 

I think that it is worth the effort to study and practice simple priming methods that may help one create an environment that stimulates the desired lifestyle, actions, or thoughts that one is hoping to produce.  Understanding that small cues in our environment can have a big impact on our minds can help us feel better about ourselves when we have trouble reaching a goal, and can give us easy first steps to reach the goals we set out for.