How to use priming to your advantage?
After watching Marvel Studios’ movie Black Widow, my 13-year old started falling into the famous fighting pose — flipping her hair, sticking one arm back, crouching down to the ground…the whole shebang. It was intentional of course, for the thrill of it. But, she also started behaving tougher than her usual self. She stopped making a big deal of her occasional hurts and scratches. She started to take her workouts seriously. She started to hold her planks for longer. This new behavior wasn’t something she was doing consciously. The action-packed spy thriller was priming her into acting tougher.
If you’re thinking, “Yeah…kids are gullible”, think again. You might be unconsciously behaving like one of the characters in the TV series you are watching these days.
I feel watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel leaves me chirpier than usual. I start speaking faster, walking faster, cracking jokes more often. I unconsciously start to emulate this witty character who says the first thing that pops into her mind.
It’s not just me
An experiment was conducted by psychology researchers in a British university coffee room where employees used to help themselves to tea or coffee. A list of suggestive costs was on display and people paid by dropping money into an honesty box.
One day, a picture was displayed right above the honesty box without any warning or notice. The picture was that of human eyes watching people as they dropped money in the box. The researchers alternated the image every week with that of flowers.
It was observed that people paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed in the poster rather than a control image. Just a symbolic reminder of being watched altered people’s behavior. Similar results were observed repeatedly by other experiments like this, this, and this.
Do you believe this can happen to you?
The surprising thing is that most people would think not. “This can never happen to me”, “I’m beyond getting influenced like that”. And that’s what we need to understand — We get primed by our environment unconsciously and we have no conscious control of it. It happens to all of us. It’s human. Disbelief isn’t an option.
Our perception of how we act is as follows.
Before reacting to a situation, we think using our past experiences and knowledge, an activity carried out by our conscious mind. Accordingly, we make a decision.
An average person is known to make 35,000 decisions a day. That’s roughly 2,000 decisions in an hour, a decision every two seconds!
If we were analyzing every situation consciously, we’ll be acting like sloths.
In reality, our conscious mind doesn’t have the bandwidth to evaluate every situation. So it outsources most of the work to the fast-thinking unconscious mind, which reacts to situations quickly with little or no effort. It’s automatic, i.e., we have no voluntary control.
This quick response comes with a cost. Our fast-thinking unconscious is gullible. It’s easily primed by the environment. It turns what it sees and what it hears into quick impressions. We mostly act based on our quick impressions.
Your impressions of the unconscious mind eventually turn into beliefs of the conscious mind.
How can we use priming to our advantage?
Fortunately, the opposite also works. If we start to act like something we are not, our mind takes in these actions as part of an identity. It adopts this new image of you and turns it into a belief. This behavior is called reciprocal priming.
e.g., if you start writing a page every day, even though you’re not a writer, your mind creates a writer identity of you. If you start running 3–4 times a week although you’re not really a runner, your mind creates a runner identity of you. Instead of the environment priming your mind, your actions start to prime your mind.
What happens if you start to act but your environment stays as-is or works against you? Let’s say you are trying to lose weight. You start to work out regularly but you’re constantly listening to people around you whining about not being able to lose weight. You are watching shows where people are eating junk food all the time. You are following YouTubers who are always cooking unhealthy foods.
Although you are consciously working out to build a new identity, you are also constantly getting exposed to factors working against your new identity. It’s nudging you to eat junk food, sit for long hours on the couch, etc. There is a conflict between your conscious and unconscious. To succeed, they need to be on the same team. Let the environment work for you, not against you like subscribing to healthy food channels, watching shows where actors are fit, and so on.
It’s on us to alter the environment to help us make the right decisions. If we don’t, the environment will alter us into making the wrong decisions.
Don’t become what you watch. Watch what you want to become.
Credits:
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
