Priming Effects: Quick Insights

Let’s start with an activity. First, answer each of these questions with the first word that comes to mind. If I burn firewood, and something goes up the chimney, that something is ___________? If I don’t have any money, you might say that I am __________? If I tell you a funny story, and you laugh, I have told you a __________? If a table is made out of sturdy, light-colored wood, it is most likely made out of ________? The white of an egg is called a _______?

If you are like most people, you just said “yolk,” not white (or even “albumen” or “glair”!). The white of an egg is called a white, right? So why did you probably get to the end and say, “yolk”? The reason is that your experience of answering the previous questions with rhyming answers (joke, smoke, broke, oak) led you to expect that the next word in the sequence would also rhyme.

What is Priming?

You were set up, or primed, to respond in a particular way to the question above. Priming occurs when exposure to a stimulus (i.e., a word, an image, or a sound) influences the response to a subsequent stimulus, without awareness or intention. Consciousness, which we’ll learn more about in this module, describes our awareness of stimuli. People have long been fascinated by what can influence our behavior outside of our conscious awareness. Research shows that priming can influence our verbal and written responses, but can it also influence our behavior? The original research on behavioral priming was conducted by two psychologists, John Bargh and T. Andrew Elliot, in the 1980s and 1990s. They found that when people were unconsciously exposed to certain words or images, it influenced their behavior in unexpected ways.

For example, in one study, participants were asked to complete a word-fragment completion task. Half of the participants were primed, without being aware of it, with words related to the stereotype of the elderly (e.g. “wrinkled,” “gray,” “Florida”), and then asked to walk down the hallway. The researchers found that the participants who were primed with the elderly stereotype walked significantly slower than the control group.^[1]This was an exciting development! Other researchers tried to test the limits of what priming could do. Could you prime people to act a certain way without them knowing? Could you prime them to be smarter? To be kinder? To be healthier?

In one study, priming students with the idea of a stereotypical professor versus soccer hooligans led participants in the “professor” condition to earn higher scores on a trivia game (Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). Unfortunately, in several follow-up instances, this finding did not replicate, meaning that it did not reveal the same results when tested again (Shanks et al, 2013).

Does Priming Really Work?

It would be nice if students could raise test scores simply by thinking about professors, but studies imply that it’s not that simple. Many studies on this type of behavioral priming have failed to replicate the original findings, while others have found that the effects of priming are relatively small and context-dependent. Additionally, there have been concerns about the processes used in many priming studies. This does not discredit priming as a whole (after all, you probably answered “yolk” to the question above), but it shows that our understanding of priming is still evolving. As a result of more recent research, psychologists have had to adjust their understanding of social priming. While priming effects may be real, the extent of their influence and their underlying mechanisms are still debated, and more research is needed to fully understand the phenomenon.

It’s important to note that there are different types of priming—some more conceptual or based on language, like the “yolk” example, and others that rely on subliminal cues, like the example used to prime students to think about professors, which is considered a type of social (or behavioral) priming. Most of the controversial research on priming relates to social priming.

---