Priming can be seen in everyday life, influencing how we react to sensory and neutral stimuli. The effect can have a tremendous impact on our decision-making and behavior. Studies examining the effect suggest that we can be primed to behave in all sorts of ways stemming from what we have read, watched, and heard.

Psychologist and professor at Yale University, Dr. John Bargh, demonstrated the effects of priming in a famous unscrambling task. Students were placed into three conditions: unscrambling sentences reflecting either aggression, patience, or positivity. After completing the task, participants were told to wait for the researcher to verify their answers. Dr. Bargh and the research team found that those who unscrambled sentences relating to aggression were the most frustrated by the delay, whereas the students who were given polite stimuli (sentences relating to patience or positivity) were not bothered by the wait time. This study can be used to demonstrate the strength of priming, proving that our actions and behavior can be altered by the information we are exposed to.¹ 

Everyday stimuli can prime people in many other fascinating ways. For example, a 2009 study found that participants who held a hot cup of coffee before an interview thought the interviewer had a “warmer” personality than those who held a cold beverage.¹² Something similar happens when you look at your mobile phone. Because our phones are closely associated with our social relationships, simply thinking about your phone might prime you to think about your friends and family. One study found that priming participants with their mobile phones even reduced their need to belong, suggesting that looking at our phones could prime us to remember our interpersonal attachments and temporarily fulfill our social needs.¹³

Priming can also function on a systemic level, popular media decides what stories we are exposed to and what flies under the radar. We can be primed to hold all sorts of beliefs that may not only be inaccurate but also harmful. For one, the media plays an important role in maintaining or challenging bias. In a study by John Sonett and colleagues, they examined the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the racially biased reporting during this time. Specifically calling out the combination of visual and verbal cues, the researchers found that major news platforms primed racial stereotypes in their delivery and images that they chose to feature.⁸ Priming people with racially biased information will shape their future interactions with various ethnic groups. Inaccurate media coverage that is guided by implicit racism can have major implications for the groups who are victims of judgment. This can affect employment opportunities, healthcare, interpersonal relationships, and beyond.  

However, priming isn’t always negative. In the corporate world, leaders and managers seek new ways to intrinsically motivate their employees. Incorporating intentional social priming might be an effective method for influencing employee behavior, encouraging them to unconsciously respond to certain cues and ultimately work more productively. While this can be achieved in multiple ways, studies show that when motivation comes from the individual (intrinsic), we can observe sustained behavior change.⁹ Fieldwork led by Alexander D. Stajkovic and colleagues found that when a CEO primed his team with emails that contained achievement-related words (ex, prevail, accomplish, master), effectiveness rose by 15%, and efficiency rose by 35% over the workweek. An added bonus is that priming imposes no additional costs to the company yet is an evidence-based method for a boost in motivation.¹⁰ 

That said, there are a few ethical issues around using social priming to influence people’s behavior outside of their awareness, even when it results in positive societal outcomes. The priming process can be very powerful, potentially infringing on individual autonomy to influence public opinion. Because of these ethical considerations, the use of priming in highly persuasive areas such as marketing or politics is a subject of ongoing debate.

On a more positive note, another area where priming is often used effectively is in educational settings. Educators who employ priming techniques—like letting students preview a study list for an upcoming exam—can help reduce error rates and improve learning outcomes. Researchers have even found that brief brain-training sessions can cognitively prime students for math or reading by activating the neural systems involved in learning, ultimately increasing their educational performance.¹⁴ Moreover, consistent priming with three 20-minute brain game sessions per week over four months increased students’ math and reading achievement test scores more than control students who did not receive brain training.

Priming happens in our implicit memory, the part of our memory system where information is stored and retrieved below our level of consciousness. Unlike explicit recollection—where we consciously remember information—priming involves the selective activation of neurons representing similar stimuli. Let’s explore the neurological basis for priming more closely to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

Neural Mechanisms

Psychologists have found that units of information—also referred to as schemas—are stored in our long-term memory.² Sights, smells, and sounds can activate these schemas. When triggered, related memories become easier to access. Think of how certain smells can trigger autobiographical memories, even if you can’t consciously place the scent or determine why it’s connected to a specific experience. 

So, how does this happen? Priming suggests that certain schemas are activated in unison, which causes related or connected units of information to activate simultaneously. Once related schemas are activated and more accessible, it becomes easier for us to draw the connection between the two. Thus, in the future, we will respond to related information faster when a unit is activated. For example, the schemas related to rainstorms and slick roads may be linked in our memories. As a result, when we drive and it is raining, the memory of slick roads comes to mind, leading us to slow down and take greater precaution.

Simply put, the more that these schemas are recalled in unison, the stronger the connection, leading to faster recall of the two concepts. 

But how do we know this is all happening unconsciously? Word-stem completion tasks are a common method for studying priming and implicit memory. In these tasks, participants are given a word stem (the beginning of a word) and asked to complete it. For example, if the word stem is “ele,” people might complete the word with “elegant” or “elephant.” These types of tasks demonstrate unconscious priming because people are more likely to complete stems with words they’ve encountered recently, even when they don’t consciously remember seeing those words.

Interestingly, these tests have also been done on people with explicit memory impairments, such as amnesic patients with damage to the medial temporal lobe, a brain region involved in conscious memory processing. Research shows that people with and without amnesia perform similarly on word-stem completion tests despite amnesics performing much more poorly when asked if they recognize words from the prior priming list.¹⁵ While amnesic patients can’t recall words as easily as controls, they can be primed by them all the same. Overall, studies from brain-injured patients suggest that priming occurs in a brain system separate from the medial temporal lobe that supports our explicit memory. 

People with Alzheimer’s also show priming effects despite having difficulty recalling words. However, Alzheimer’s patients tend to successfully complete fewer word stems than healthy patients, showing impaired priming on semantic priming tasks. This research suggests that the disease causes a breakdown in semantic memory—or memory for general knowledge—rather than an inability to access these memories.¹⁶ In other words, this form of dementia prevents schemas from activating properly, interfering with the process involved in triggering related memories and making connections between ideas.

There are numerous types of priming that can occur. Each one works in a specific way that produces different effects.

Positive and Negative Priming

This form of priming influences our processing speeds. Positive priming makes us process information faster and reduces the time required for memory retrieval. As discussed in the doctor/nurse example, positive priming relies heavily on connections between different stimuli. Negative priming, on the other hand, slows down information processing in our minds by requiring us to focus on a stimulus that we previously ignored. For example, imagine you are playing tic-tac-toe with your friend. After playing a couple of rounds as “X,” it will be harder to focus on being “O” if you decide to switch roles. 

Studies using brain imaging have shown that both positive and negative priming activate several areas of the cerebral cortex, especially those involved in decision-making.¹⁷ More specifically, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in these regions differ significantly between primed and unprimed words, with primed words typically showing less neural activity than unprimed words. This suggests that the brain is processing information more efficiently during positive priming than negative priming and explains how this affects our ability to process information and make decisions.

Semantic Priming

Semantic priming occurs when the prime and the target are semantically-related. Again, we can return to the doctor/nurse example above: the word “doctor” is a semantic prime for “nurse” because the two words are logically and linguistically associated. Semantic priming is thought to work through a process of spreading activation in the brain: thinking of the word “doctor” triggers activation of neurons representing this concept in your memory, which spreads to a network of related concepts or nodes such as “nurse,” “hospital,” “medicine,” and “patient.” The closer the semantic relationship between concepts in your memory, the faster you will be able to recognize one after seeing the other.

Repetition Priming

Also called direct priming, repetition priming occurs when a stimulus is presented and primes subsequent recognition of that same stimulus. After being exposed to a stimulus, your brain will be able to process later encounters with that stimulus more quickly. In other words, repetition priming primes your brain to react more quickly to something you have already encountered.

Perceptual Priming

Perceptual priming takes place when stimuli have similar forms. For example, the word “goat” will provoke a fast response when it is near the word “boat” because the two words are perceptually similar, even though they do not share the same semantic category.

Conceptual Priming

In contrast to perceptual priming, conceptual priming activates related memories and associations rather than words or stimuli that share a similar form.² For example, “shirt” and “pants” are conceptually related, as are “hot” and “cold” or “yellow” and “banana.” How does this differ from semantic priming? Conceptual priming can involve broad associations and even emotional connections, not just linguistic relationships. Some of these broader associations might include “innovation” and “technology” or “green” and “environmentally-friendly.” Companies often take advantage of the abstract relationships involved in conceptual priming to get us to associate their products with specific feelings or values.

Associative Priming

Associative priming occurs when one stimulus primes another, even if the two are not semantically or conceptually related (though they can be). What sets this type of priming apart is that the two stimuli are often associated with each other because they frequently occur together in a pair. For example, “dog” is an associative prime for “cat” while “salt” is an associative prime for “pepper.”

Context Priming

Similar to associative priming, context priming occurs when the context of the stimulus increases how quickly we can process that stimulus. Consider how we rely on contextual clues when reading text: the specific grammar and vocabulary used in a sentence prime us for certain words, helping us process words in a sentence more quickly than when we encounter them alone.²⁰ This effect is even more impactful with words that are uncommon or unfamiliar. 

Response Priming

Response priming is a form of visuomotor priming that occurs when a stimulus influences the response to another stimulus when the two are presented rapidly one after another.18 In research on response priming, participants are asked to react to a target stimulus as quickly as possible. However, a prime stimulus occurs right before the target stimulus, which is either chosen to produce the same response as the target or an alternative response. A key property of response priming is that it can occur outside of visual awareness. Even when participants are unaware of the prime stimulus and only recall seeing the target stimulus, the prime can still affect their response. The finding that response priming effects can be completely independent of visual awareness suggests that our visuomotor system can process visual information unconsciously—how neat is that?

Being aware of priming can both mitigate this cognitive bias’ negative impact and enable us to make use of its helpful effects. Priming can influence our behavior in ways that can be harmful to those around us. No one likes to be considered judgemental or be accused of holding biases, yet sometimes the effects of priming are strong enough for associations to appear subconsciously, causing us to act and speak in ways we normally wouldn’t. With an awareness of the priming effect, we can remain conscious of how previous experiences may influence our present decision-making.

In considering this cognitive bias’ potentially helpful effects, we can make priming work for us! This bias can work to our advantage in improving numerous cognitive functions, such as our reading comprehension skills, our listening skills, and our ability to process information quickly. Say, for example, you need to read a long paper for your 8 AM class, and you already have an understanding of the topic because you have been studying it all year. Your existing knowledge will act as a prime for this paper, allowing you to read through it a lot faster without scrutinizing every word. Priming can even impact some physical skills, such as our walking speed. Thus, it is in everyone’s best interest to develop an awareness of how the priming effect works. As discussed, priming can help us to become more productive in our daily tasks, simply by reading or viewing motivating language and content, it is a small task to implement in our routines that can take us a long way. 

Though completely avoiding priming may be impossible given the way in which we subconsciously process information and develop habits, we can certainly develop an awareness of how this bias affects our lives. In doing so, we may be able to catch ourselves relying on existing information, or primes, and mitigating its most harmful effects. 

Additionally, it may not be beneficial to avoid it entirely. We are often overloaded with tasks, leaving our mental resources depleted. While relying too heavily on priming has been shown to have some negative effects, we can use it to create positive mental shortcuts. We can make use of existing research on the subject to find ways to prime our brains to create positive mannerisms and characteristics. Indeed, researchers have explored how the priming effect can incite positive changes in our emotions, behaviors, and general thought processes.

Health Management

Researchers John Wryobeck and Yiwei Chen have found that the priming effect can subconsciously facilitate individuals’ health behaviors in their everyday environment. Their experiment is similar to the one that was previously mentioned, in which students were asked to unscramble sentences. Some students were given sentences that promoted a healthy and active lifestyle, while others were given sentences that did not. The students that were primed by sentences about healthy lifestyles were found to be more likely to take the stairs when going to class, unlike the other students who were found to be more likely to take the elevator. This experiment demonstrates that when put to good use, priming can enable us to become healthy and more active.³

Honesty Promotion

A study from a British university provides another example of how the priming effect can be used in a positive manner. The study examined the effect of placing an image of watchful eyes on a collection box in the university’s coffee lounge. The eyes caused students to pay nearly three times as much for their drinks than they would have without the image. The findings from this study provided the first evidence that the social cues of being watched can influence people to change their behavior—in this case, for the better. Indeed, making use of the priming effect to ameliorate how people act is one way to extract the positive features of this cognitive bias.⁴

The priming effect has a long history in psychological literature. Since the early 1980s, researchers have studied priming by considering how exposure to certain types of information can influence how we behave and think. The earliest work on priming focused on how exposure to specific primes altered social impressions, as well as how they affected emotions and other mental processes. Among the earliest researchers to approach the topic of priming were Bargh and Pietromonaco in 1982, Fazio and colleagues in 1983, and Smith and Branscomb in 1987.⁵

The results of these initial studies demonstrated that we do, in fact, appear to utilize specific social knowledge in our judgments, even when this arises from unrelated and irrelevant sources. For example, in Bargh and Pietromonaco's study, they found that exposing participants to words related to hostility made them more likely to judge descriptions of individuals as more hostile in a later task.¹¹ In another study by Bargh and colleagues,  in 1996, researchers tried priming participants with words stereotypically associated with elderly people to see if it would affect their behavior.¹⁹ The results were fascinating: people who had been primed with the list of study words related to elderly adults were more likely to walk slowly while leaving the testing booth than those who had not received priming. This study offers an interesting look at how priming plays a role in systems of stereotyping—though it has recently been criticized for lack of replicability (more on this soon).

A great deal of the focus from early priming research remained concentrated on examining the processes by which priming affects social impressions. Over time, the goals of priming research shifted to include a broader scope of its effects. In the present day, priming effects in psychological research encompass a highly diverse set of phenomena, such as political orientation, consumer habits, and racial bias. The effects of priming are widespread, and the boundaries in research continue to be explored. 

Despite quite a large body of research showing priming effects in various populations across a wide variety of contexts, the concept of priming has come under scrutiny in recent years. Social priming research has been a key area of criticism in psychology’s replication crisis, as many high-profile studies have failed to reproduce their original results. When attempting to replicate some of these priming studies with advanced methodological techniques and large sample sizes, researchers have found priming effects much smaller than initially reported.

For example, recent attempts to replicate the 1996 “elderly walking” study by Bargh et al. failed to find similar effects.²¹ In response to this, Bargh cited two successful replications of the study revealing moderating factors: one found the effect mainly among people high in self-consciousness, and the other found it was more pronounced in people who liked (rather than disliked) the elderly. Whether or not these moderating factors fully explain issues with replication in priming research remains a subject of debate.

Other early priming research has received similar criticisms. Authors Ulrich Schimmack, Moritz Heene, and Kamini Kesavan measured the replicability of 31 priming studies cited by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow and reported that “there is strong evidence that the studies provide an overly optimistic image of the robustness of social priming effects.”²² Overall, they found that many of the studies have low replicability and suggested that at least some of the reported results are likely false positives. Kahneman himself commented on this analysis, acknowledging that he perhaps “placed too much faith in underpowered studies” when drawing conclusions about priming in his book.²³ He argues that it is still plausible that actions can be primed, as there is plenty of evidence to suggest that thoughts can be primed and there is “no reason to draw a sharp line between the priming of thoughts and the priming of actions.” 

It’s important to highlight here that these replicability issues do not mean priming is an entirely bogus concept. The basic idea of priming has been replicated and accepted as a regular process of human cognition for decades.²⁴ The question isn’t whether exposure to an initial stimulus can unconsciously influence someone’s thoughts or judgements, but whether or not priming can actually influence behavior. 

The controversies surrounding priming research has led to lengthy discussions about the reliability of psychological research findings in general. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, concerns about flawed experimental design, experimenter bias, selective reporting, and small sample sizes have prompted behavioral psychology researchers to improve their statistical methods and adopt more rigorous experimental standards. As research advances, it will be interesting to see how priming might extend beyond cognitive effects to influence our actions.

Priming typically plays an integral role in marketing campaigns for companies with recognizable brands, the priming effect can be used to exploit how people think in order to increase sales. Indeed, companies can activate or bring certain associations into the memory of consumers to make them more receptive to the product the company wishes to sell. This process is called a “behavioral pump” and can dramatically influence consumer decision-making. Without an awareness of how the priming effect impacts their purchasing habits, consumers can fall victim to the marketing techniques of big companies.

We can find many examples of brand priming in our day-to-day experiences. A simple example would be a bakery leaving its front door open so that passersby can smell the delectable baked goods and follow the trail inside. Colors can also be used as primes as we make various implicit connections. To illustrate, red is often associated with strong emotion and passion, whereas blue is associated with the sensation of calm. For this reason, activewear brands may choose to feature red in their marketing, in order to invigorate their audience and get them motivated to hit the gym.   

Applied to the use of artificial intelligence, priming can be quite advantageous and efficient. When using AI chatbots or natural language processing we are constantly feeding it prompts, and thus, providing it with more and more contextual information. In doing so we are actually priming the system for its next response. If you are to start a conversation with a chatbot about highly rated restaurants in Italy, you will not have to restate the location when you ask for top tourist attractions, the system is now primed based on the initial request. 

Recommendation systems are another example of our ability to prime AI. Most streaming platforms include a “for you” section, with movie/music/post recommendations that are based on media that you have already consumed. In short, we are priming the AI to accurately suggest based on our taste. Certain platforms will even include a percentage to indicate how similar the content is compared to the data it has collected from your watch history. Certain cell phones are even embedded with shortcuts that prompt you to visit frequently used applications given the time of day. For example, if you routinely check your social media at lunchtime, your phone may send you a notification around 12 PM, providing you a direct root to the app. Artificial intelligence can be primed by our habits to make our interactions with technology efficient and simple. 

A study by Chartrand and colleagues provides a clear example of the priming effect in action. In the study, consumers were primed with words representing either high-end retail brands or low-cost ones. In a later task, the consumers were found to have a stronger preference for products of the high-end brands if they had been exposed to the brand’s name during the priming stage. For example, if a study participant had been primed with words representing a high-end retail brand such as Gucci, this participant would be more likely later on to have a preference for the brand.

This study presents evidence suggesting that brands’ goals can be activated by situational cues that lead consumers to make decisions unconsciously. Indeed, the study, therefore, challenges the notion that mental functioning must be conscious by presenting a case where the priming effect leads our mental functioning to occur through unconscious processing.⁶

The priming effect can also be seen when money is involved in our decision-making. A study by Kathleen Vohs found that priming subjects with images of money dramatically changed their subsequent behavior. Vohs discovered that reminders of money led participants to take on a self-sufficient orientation in which they preferred to be free of dependency and dependents. Specifically, reminders of money led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others.

The pattern of self-sufficiency demonstrated by the study illustrates the way in which priming can change our behavior. With reminders of money, people adopt a more individualistic attitude while diminishing communal motivations.⁷

What it is

The priming effect occurs when an individual’s exposure to a certain stimulus subconsciously influences his or her response to a subsequent stimulus. These stimuli are often related to words or images that people see in their day-to-day lives.

Why it happens

Priming leads certain schemas in our long-term memories to be activated in unison, which in turn leads related or connected units of information to be activated at the same time. Once related schemas are activated and more accessible, it becomes easier for us to draw related information into memory more quickly, and we can thus respond faster when the need arises.

Example #1 - Consumer preferences

If consumers are primed with words associated with high-end retail brands, they will prefer these brands over low-end retail brands. However, consumers who are primed with words associated with low-end retail brands do not prefer high-end retail brands, thus demonstrating the priming effect in action.

Example #2 - Money and decision-making

When people are primed with images of money, they adopt individualistic behavior, and they prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. The priming effect clearly takes hold as the reminder of money leads people to make different decisions than they otherwise would have made.

How to avoid it

Developing an awareness of how priming occurs can mitigate some of the cognitive bias’s most harmful effects. However, we can also make use of existing research on the subject to prime our brains to create positive mannerisms and characteristics. Indeed, the priming effect can incite positive changes in our emotions, behaviors, and general thought processes.

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