Thus, even without the conscious awareness of processing a face, the race of primed faces can influence behavior. In a post-task interview, only 2 of 41 participants reported seeing the faces and the two that did were unable to identify the race of faces they saw. Those who subliminally viewed Black faces reacted with more hostility than participants exposed to White faces. After completing over 100 trials, the computer displayed an error message, and participants were instructed to restart the task. Before each trial, the computer displayed a subliminal image (shown for under 26 milliseconds) of either a young Black face or a young Caucasian face. (1996) instructed non-Black participants to complete a tedious visual computerized task. Participants who unscrambled words like “Florida”, “bingo”, and “conservative” subsequently walked slower down the hallway when leaving the experiment than participants who unscrambled age-neutral words, despite never being exposed to the word “slow”. Similarly, in a second experiment, participants were asked to unscramble words either relevant to elderly stereotypes or age-neutral words. Those who were exposed to sentences with words related to rudeness interrupted the experimenter more quickly and frequently than participants exposed to sentences with words related to politeness. Once participants completed the task, they were told to locate the experimenter to begin the next part of the experiment but each time the experimenter would be in a conversation with a confederate. In their initial experiment, participants were asked to unscramble sentences that contained words related to either rudeness or politeness. (1996) demonstrated three examples of how unconsciously processed stimuli can drive behavior. In addition to influencing our impressions of someone, priming can also affect people’s actions. However, when the potential influence of primed stimuli is consciously acknowledged, the effects of priming are often diminished (Molden, 2014). As a result, researchers have found that people can be unknowingly primed as a result of exposure to almost anything around us: words, photos, ideas, objects in a room, colors on a wall, cultural symbols (e.g., flags), and smells (Doyen et al., 2014 Gilovich et al., 2018). Furthermore, subsequent work demonstrated that participants in priming studies are generally unaware of both the priming stimuli and how their memory of the stimuli is later expressed, indicating that priming can be an unconscious process (Bargh & Pietromonaco, 1982 Tulving & Schacter, 1990). For example, when exposed to positive personality traits (e.g., “adventurous”, “independent”) or negative traits (e.g., “reckless”, “conceited”) before reading an ambiguous paragraph about a theoretical person, participants rated and characterized the theoretical person as more positive or more negative, respectively (Higgins et al., 1977). Finally, the newly activated representations result in perceptual or behavioral changes.Įarly research on the effects of priming studied how evoking thoughts of certain personality traits influence impressions of others. Second, the prime increases a conceptual category’s accessibility in the brain, which increases the likelihood of that conceptual category influencing the encoding of new information (Fiske & Taylor, 2013).
First, a person is exposed to a prime stimulus, which could be an image, word, or a feature of the environment. Priming, or changes in our perception due to recent experiences, is often the result of a three-step process (Doyen et al., 2014). Through a cognitive process called priming, certain stimuli can activate our brain’s memory system and subsequently influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions without us even noticing. Have you associated the word “slow” with the elderly, a flag with your identity, or the word “dangerous” with people of a certain race? These everyday associations can be evoked by subtle stimuli, such as words, actions, or objects, and can substantially influence people’s behavior.
Written by Cherice Chan and Dillon Murphy
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