Hidden in plain sight

Bargh’s and Doyen’s findings have been widely debated, but many other studies show that when priming is harnessed correctly, the phenomenon can have powerful effects in the real world. Gary Latham, an organisational psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and doctoral student Amanda Shantz recently assigned fund-raising, call-centre employees to two groups. Each group received written instructions for speaking to potential donors, but one group’s instruction sheet also showed a photo of a person winning a race (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol 109, p 9). “Much to my astonishment, the group that saw the photo raised significantly more money than the control group,” Latham says. He was so surprised that he ran the experiment again in another call centre. And then another. Each time, primed workers raised more money than their unprimed counterparts. Importantly, almost every time Latham asked the employees what effect the picture had on their performance, he got the same response: “What picture?” The photo had influenced them on a purely subconscious level. There are many similar results; one paper showed that subtle cues related to alcohol could even improve team morale and group bonding. Priming seems to be particularly important for guiding our attention.  For instance, if you’ve just seen the word “ 83 per cent of surgeons failed to see an image of a gorilla embedded in an X-ray scan” “doctor”, you’re likely to spot the word “nurse” more quickly than the word “table” when strings of letters are flashed before you. That means that with the right kind of priming, you might counteract the effects of inattentional blindness. Like an airport ground crew directing a plane to the right gate, priming might help guide our minds toward the details that matter. Slavich, for instance, has showed more than 1500 students a vintage photograph of a city street. At the centre of the image is a woman in mid-air, accidentally captured by the photographer as she jumped to her death. When the students viewed the photo for a few seconds, only 2 per cent noticed the woman – as might be expected from the work on inattentional blindness. Even when Slavich instructed them to look for animate objects or unusual events, viewers still missed her. But when the students read a story about a depressed woman first, the recognition rate increased to 12 per cent. Although the number was still low, the result suggests that our subconscious mind is actively taking stock of all that goes on around us to direct our limited attention to the events that matter most to our past experience. Such findings are ringing alarm bells. “It’s troubling to realise how easily goals can be implanted without us being aware of it,” Latham says. “I think the  CIA is probably watching this stuff very closely.” At least officially, however, priming is only being used for benign effects: The UK and US governments have set up a “nudge unit” to see if well-placed primes could increase the effectiveness of health campaigns, for instance. Researchers in the Netherlands have found, for example, that when dieters passed a poster advertising low-calorie recipes as they entered a butcher shop, they were less likely to accept free snacks. Others are hoping that priming could  be employed to boost the benefits of drugs – through a mechanism akin to  the placebo effect.